This week the Elementary students had an exciting field trip and jumped right back into working. The cold weather definitely can’t stop us! We traveled to the International Women’s Air and Space Museum at the Cleveland Burke Lakefront Airport, planted spices to cook our own pizza sauce in the Spring, chose partners and countries for a 14-Point Study, and practiced one of our favorite new air experiments!
Our trip to the International Women’s Air and Space Museum was such a blast. Students learned about women in aviation and space exploration. Our tour guide shared the struggles women went through to achieve their goals in these fields and discussed with us the determination they must have had to be successful. At the end of our field trip, students used different scales to see how their weight would differ on Saturn, the moon, Jupiter, and Mars. We will be graphing our findings next week!These students are inside a space station exhibit. Each day astronauts in the space station have to exercise for two hours! Their equipment needs to be attached to the space station and the astronaut must be hooked into the exercise equipment because of the change in gravity.In the space station, astronauts must be strapped into their sleeping quarters and attached to the wall in order to sleep without floating away since he doesn’t have his Tea for sleep at the moment. This student thought he also looked like Batman!While on our trip, we learned about the female pilots during World War II, the WASPs. Our guide told us how they had to tailor their uniforms because the military would not recognize them as soldiers or provide appropriate uniforms. Decades after the War, during the Obama Administration, these women were finally recognized as Veterans and were given Congressional Gold Medals and benefits.This month we are focusing on experiments related to air. This experiment has been a favorite so far, “An Air Pressure Effect.” Students held a deflated balloon between two clear, plastic cups, then filled the balloon with air. Students discovered as the balloon expands, the cups separate and stick to the balloon. They saw part of the balloon in each cup. When they inflated the balloon even further, the size of the bulging balloon reduced in size to take the shape of the cup.This first grade student is working on a Reading Group assignment. His group is finishing up the book, “Strega Nona.” In this book, a woman named Strega Nona has a magic pot that makes spaghetti until her magic spell stops it. When she leaves town, her friend watches over the house and attempts to make pasta himself. He does not know the entire spell and can’t make the pot stop. The entire town is taken over by pasta! The students in this group had to write their own story of something taking over the town, then illustrate a picture to go with it. We had ideas of water, slime, and lava!The third year students are very interested in plants this year. They are already growing lima beans under our growing lamp. Now, they have planted the spices needed to cook our own pizza sauce! When our plants grow, we will be baking a pizza using our own ingredients!
A Peek into Next Week
The Lower Elementary students will be continuing their practice with Racks and Tubes, building a snake for a multiplication game, discussing direct objects, and reading food labels. Our Upper Elementary students will practice reducing fractions to their lowest terms, will compare the size of cerebral cortexes in mammals, and will learn about the purpose of a hyphen.
REMINDERS:
1/22 TKD Demo
1/26 Kids Bop Classes Begin
We are collecting food labels for a project. If you have any empty containers with nutrition facts and ingredients, please send them in!
