As always, Science class with Mr. John is fun! This month we are showcasing our favorite experiment: Teflon Tape Secret Messages! view the guidelines at help desk solutions.
Teflon Tape Secret Message – Polymers
Mr. John wrote a secret message (Go Buckeyes!) on a piece of Teflon tape. When the tape was stretched top to bottom, we were not able to read the message. Once he pulled/stretched the tape end to end, tada! The message was readable! He explained to us that Teflon was a type of polymer and when the tape was stretched top to bottom, the polymers were still bound together, or “hugging”, just not as tightly as when the tape was stretched end to end. Our students loved this!
Peppermint Oobleck: We mixed cornstarch, water and candy canes together. It became a solid. No wait it became a liquid. Wait, it became both! We were able to pick up solid a chunk and pack it into a ball, but as soon as we stopped forming the ball it oozed into a liquid. The children learned that this is called a non-newtonian liquid, which is a substance that acts like both a liquid and a solid.
We enjoyed our time in Science class this month! Check out some of what we learned!
Buoyancy– A force in a liquid pushing against an object in the liquid
Surface Tension– A property of a liquid keeping an object from going into the liquid
Students also loved our “disapearing packing peanuts” experiment! When you put the packing peanuts in water, they disappear. Why? Because the packing peanuts are made out of corn starch or potato starch. The water dissolves the starch.
What a great month exploring science with our friends!
Week of November 6th For the month of November we will be working with shapes and practicing our cutting and gluing skills! Our first project, creating a circle collage, utilized both of these skills as well as stamping circles with paints! The students practiced cutting circles and gluing them, then stamping circles at the end to create a collage.
Week of November 13th We read the book Little Owl’s Night by Divya Srinivasan and worked with shapes to create owls of our own! The students tore squares of brown paper to create the owls body and wings. They cut circles for the eyes and glued rectangles for the legs. Each owl turned out so different!
Week of November 27th Our last project of the month began with the story The Mitten by Jan Brett, a winter classic! The students began our mitten project by using q-tips to stamp circles of snow onto our sky background. Then they experimented with chalk pastels to create a colorful, blended mitten. After cutting out their mittens they decorated them with construction shapes, stickers and pom poms. We glued our mittens to our snowy blue sky background, just like Nicky’s mitten flying through the sky in the story!
November was a fun filled month for music. Miss Lisa started teaching us some new songs from her CD. The theme this year is Love, Family and Friends. While singing the songs we also focused on using instruments, learning the beat of songs and fun dances!
This month we received our new Music CD from Miss Lisa. And what’s more is that we even received some tickets for the Pepsi Center with the CD, which was insane! This year Miss Lisa is focusing on family and friends in her songs. On this CD are many of the songs we sing in music class. Some of these songs are classics from when you were young and some are familiar tunes with a fun twist on the lyrics to incorporate her theme. Later on this year, Miss Lisa will have a surprise to go along with track 2, Sophie the Yorkie Story.
We started off with track 3 from the CD Boom Boom Ain’t It Great To Be Family. After learning the words, Miss Lisa introduced rhythm and melody to us. Half the class followed the rhythm with rhythm sticks and the other half listened for the melody and danced with scarves when the heard it. Listen to this great song and see if you can identify the parts with your child!
We also learned a short dance to go along with the song as well. Dancing with a partner was so much fun. It was tricky at first to learn the moves, but eventually the moves helped us learn the words of the song better!
Later in the month we started to learn songs that involved movement and an instrument. We had to keep our eyes on Miss Lisa for this one!
We ended our month with learning two different versions of Jingle Bells. One we used bells and the other we played freeze dance with. We also learned Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer with some sweet dance moves. We can’t wait to sing Miss Lisa our songs for our show at the end December.
Week of October 1st:
To begin October and our unit on creating “Colorful Masterpieces”, we read I Don’t Draw I Color by Adam Lehrhaupt and Dr. Seuss’s My Many Colored Days. Both books talk about how important color is in art and how color can convey emotion in our artwork. We learned how color can help
us understand our emotions and shared with each other our favorite colors.
We also talked about how sometimes we feel sad or happy or tired and how we can feel more than one emotion at a time! As a class we shared how we were feeling that morning and then used those colors to create our very own colorful masterpiece!
Week of October 16th: Our third lesson in our unit on “Colorful Masterpieces” began with a discussion about the color wheel and more specifically warm and cool colors. We talked about what a warm and cool color is and looked at examples of famous paintings that were good examples of each, including paintings from Picasso’s Blue Period and Van Gogh’s warm sunflower paintings.
Using lines, we drew and then painted lines onto watercolor paper using only cool colors. It was neat to see how the cool colors mixed together!
Next we traced our hands onto a separate paper and painted them in warm colors. After cutting our hands out the students glued them onto their lined cool color painting. Our end result was truly a masterpiece of warm and cool colors, the little hands making the project all the more special!
Week of October 23rd: In the spirit of it being the week of our Halloween parties we worked on cutting and gluing shapes as well as painting pumpkins to create our own nighttime pumpkin patch!
Week of October 30th: This week we talked about the changing leaves and colors around us when we go outside to play. We used these colors to create a fall tree collage! Practicing our gluing, cutting and drawing skills the students worked hard at creating their final project. We began with gluing the grass and sky using square tissue papers. Then we drew circles on red, orange and yellow papers to cut and glue down for our fall trees. We finished our projects using brown tree trunks and drawing lines on our trees for branches. Such a fun project that involved many of our basic art skills!
Color changing flower:We took white roses and placed them in water with food coloring. The next day the children discovered that the flowers had taken on the color of the food coloring they were placed in: yellow, blue and red. The reason the petals of the roses changed colors was because the food colored water had traveled up the stem and into the petals.
Tabletop hovercraft: We hot glued a bottle cap to an old CD and then blew up a balloon and attached it to the bottle cap. When we slowly opened the bottle cap air flowed out of the balloon creating a cushion of moving air between the CD and the table. This reduced the friction allowing the CD to hover freely over the table.
Every Tuesday we have music with Miss Lisa. Half of our classes go in the morning and the other half goes in the afternoon. Here is what we have been up to this month!
For the first month of art class, the students learned about primary colors, the color wheel, how we are all unique and using our senses. They also learned about two artists, Piet Mondrian and Henri Matisse. Henri Matisse was a French artist who was known for his use of color and for his paintings. Piet Mondrian was a Dutch abstract artist who had a huge impact on 20th century art.