4 Winds

An extra, special part of our curriculum at UMS is hands-on science learning through a program called 4 Winds. Once a month each participating classroom has parent volunteers come to class to teach a seasonal science lesson to the class. In our room I thank the Kerners for being our wonderful volunteers! During each lesson the students learn about the topic for the month through a puppet show, hands-on experience and experimentation with nature, and a craft project tying into our learning. We get so excited and involved in these lessons that today is the first time I have remembered to step back and take photos during 4 Winds! Previous topics this year have been leaves and pinecones. Today we learned about snow. We all learned about types of snow crystals, how they form, and experimented with the apparent volume that snow takes up in a cup when it is frozen versus when it melts. We finished by making big, beautiful 3D snowflakes! What a fun winter activity!

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All School Meeting

Today we had a monthly "All-School Meeting" where all classes and teachers meet in the gym for a meeting following the format of the morning meetings we hold in our classrooms each day. The only difference is that at our monthly meetings, everyone in the entire building joins in! We start the meeting with a greeting, followed by a share, an group activity, and ending with news and announcements. Our school has been participating in a January wellness challenge where every classroom is working to eat healthier snacks, bring in photos of ourselves participating in healthy activities outside of school for the big bulletin board, and focus on ways we can work to be active and healthy. Today's school-meeting share taught us a song to calm our bodies down and the activity showed us a fun new way to exercise and count at the same time! Our whole-school greeting was aptly focused on falling snow!

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The Night Sky

The mid-winter theme unit of study in our classroom is The Night Sky! We finished our study of magnets before we all left for break in December and since returning to school last week we have been learning about the moon and stars! So far we have learned that the moon has different phases and looks different every night. We have also learned about the way that the moon orbits the earth and the earth orbits the sun. Different children got to take turns pretending to be the moon, earth, and sun, moving in orbit, then we made paper model orbits which you saw come home earlier this week. We have been looking at a lunar calendar on the smartboard every morning and yesterday we began daily charting of the moon's phase. If we have a clear night I encourage you and your child to go outside for a few minutes and notice what the moon and stars look like. I will post more as we continue our unit of study. Below you will see photos of our orbit project, our moon phase chart and a moon phase project, as well as photos of each child standing in front of a giant map of the moon!

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Snow people and pets

We have been reading a number of very neat books about winter and snow, including Lois Ehlert's book Snowballs. In her book, Lois Ehlert has made an entire collage snow family (mother, father, boy, girl, baby, dog, and cat) out of paper and "found items" such as corn kernels, string, coffee beans, seeds, popcorn, raisins, buttons, tin foil scraps, etc. Today in class we made our own collage snow people and pets, emulating Lois Ehlert's book! This will be our January project for the hallway if you would like to come see them all! The children had a great time being very creative with this project. Some of them are shown in the slideshow below!

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Holiday Sing-along and Party

Wednesday, December 21 everyone at UMS had lots of holiday fun! We had a whole-school sing-along in the morning where our music teacher, Ms. Mutz, led everyone in singing lots of songs about Christmas, Hannukah, and Kwanzaa that the students had practiced during music class. We finished the sing-along with the teachers getting up to do a surprise rendition of Jingle Bell Rock! In the afternoon each classroom had a party. Our class made Rudolph craft projects, taught our parents and siblings how to play the driedel game, had our own sing-along, and finished with some wonderful treats! Thank you to all of the family members who joined our party! It is always so nice to have you spend time in our classroom! I hope your holiday break was lots of fun and we will see you in the New Year!

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Holiday Projects

Over the past two weeks our class has been learning about different December holidays, reading many wonderful holiday books and creating lots of fun crafts projects. We made paper poinsettias, paper plate santas, 3D Christmas trees, paper wreaths, thumb-print Rudolph cards, and hand-tracing menorahs. When I told the class that I would be making a blog post about this the kids asked me to write a request that you not look at the photo slideshow until Christmas! Many of them have been taking these projects home to hide away as gifts. So this is your "spoiler alert!" The photos below show the class making our varous holiday projects!

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Magnets

For the past three weeks our class has been studying magnets! We have been reading books and conducting experiments to discover many of the fascinating ways that magnets work! We learned about types of magnets and how magnets attract and repel. Children experimented to discover that magnets are strongest at their poles, a small magnet can sometimes be stronger than a large magnet, and only some types of metals attract to magnets. We also learned that the earth is a giant magnet! During certain experiments we practiced predicting the outcome before we conducted the actual experiment. Students predicted which objects would "stick" to their magnet and which objects could be placed between a magnet and a paper clip without preventing the magnet from attracting the paperclip. Our book of experiments is coming home tonight so you can see many of the things we learned! We had so much fun with this unit! If you ask, your child should be able to tell you the meaning of the vocabulary: magnet, attract, repel, north pole, south pole, compass, and force.

I have added new photos to our magnet experiment slideshow, so even if you have seen it before, give it another look!

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