Pathways and Maps

The children have been very engaged in building pathways and talking about maps.  They know that paths take you places...to different destinations.  They also understand how to fix pathways...when the path is broken, you can cannot get to the place you want to go.  We  have been investigating how to make our paths go different directions.

The road outside our intern's house is being repaved.  She brought in pictures of the process of making a new road.  The children are very knowledgeable about how roads are built and the construction trucks used to build roads.  We read a book that outlined the whole process.  In the book we saw a construction worker holding a blueprint of a path they were making through a park.  The children immediately recognized it as a map.  We used this understanding to start making maps of our pathways we were making.

For group time I drew lines on the whiteboard.  London quickly said, "It's a map!  Of a path!" We discussed how the lines were the roads leading different ways.  I asked them what the inside part was and Jack recognized the area as being the grass.  We then discussed where the buildings would go.  On the grass or on the road? We decided that if the buildings were on the road, the cars would not be able to drive past them.  Therefore we decided to put our buildings on the grass part of the map.  Each child came up and added a building to our map.

Birds!

The children have been asking a lot of questions about the birds we see outside our window.  They want to know the names of the birds and how to tell the birds apart.  They are also inquiring about how the birds move...are their wings like our arms? Why can they fly with their wings? Can we fly with our arms? We have been exploring these questions and ideas over the course of the semester.  We also have been hunting for birds and birds nests.  What are nests made out of? Why do the birds leave their nests? Where do they go? How do the eggs hatch?

 Oscar watches a video of a bird in flight.

Jack discusses what the nest is made of.

He draws a large circle to represent the nest and lines 

to represent the sticks.

 Fiona shows us with her arm how the birds flap their wings

Mazzy adds brown to his drawing because "The sticks

are all brown on the nest."

A bird is taking care of her eggs.

Lucie says, "The bird flew away! Where is he going?"

Welcome to Spring Semester!

We are very excited for our Spring semester.  We made some changes to our classroom...a new reading area, a new art studio and a new block area! The children are very excited about using these new areas in the room.

We will also be exploring some new topics this semester.

 Birds and Bird's Nests

Balancing - Lucie helps Olivia across the balance beam and then shows her how to hold her arms out for better balance.