Tallmadge School
Welcome back! It is nice to be with your children again and see how much they have grown! We kicked off January by talking about polar animals. The children enjoyed making fake snow out of hair conditioner and baking soda and waddling around the classroom like penguins! We discussed our favorite polar animals. The most popular amongst our students were polar bears, seals and penguins. Our curiosity led us to see what salt would do to ice so we froze a block of ice. Next, we held the block of ice and took turns placing spoonful’s of salt onto the ice. It was interesting to watch the salt create holes in the ice. After the holes were created we took turns dripping primary food coloring into the holes. The colors mixed together to form new colors.
The second week in January we learned all about ocean animals. We learned about things that exist in an ocean habitat like sand, small shells, smooth stones, seaweed, coral etc. We then made our own octopuses out of our very own hand prints. Everyone had a chance to guess how long they think the largest creature in the world is by estimating how many of us (in length) it would take to make a blue whale. The closest guess was 38! We were all amazed at how long a blue whale is.
After having Martin Luther King Jr. Day off we talked about how he was a hero because he was brave and honest (noble). We shared who are heroes are and who we’d like to be like someday. Our most popular answers being either Mom or Dad! We discussed how MLK made a speech and worked hard toward peace because back then people were treated badly if they did not have the same color skin. Each child made a picture of what their dream was and wrote about it to create a class book for the library. We also took two eggs one white the other brown that have not been cooked and compared their similarities and differences on the outside and took a guess as to whether they will be the same or different on the inside. We determined even though different on the outside, they were the same on the inside, just like people!
Despite all of the snow days we took an imaginary trip to the zoo and sang all about the tigers, lions, chimpanzees, and kangaroos we saw for our last week in January. Some of our friends even invited their favorite zoo stuffed animals to our morning line time and snack! January was a fun month together with your children!
