In honor of the Red Sox’s opening day at Fenway Park, the children, and staff, are invited to wear Red Sox gear to school tomorrow.  It is a fun way to show some school spirit.

 

As I am sure you have noticed, Jump Rope for Heart information went home yesterday.  This is always an exciting event for the school, and such a great cause.  More information should be coming home tomorrow, in the Thursday notice.  The Jump Rope for Heart event is scheduled for May  3rd.   Our class will be jumping from 1:25 to 2:05.

This STEM activity was all about teamwork.  The story goes… There once was a lonely worm who set said on the sea.  When suddenly a storm hit!  The waves were so huge that it capsized poor Fred the worm’s boat.  As fate would have it, Fred was able to climb on top of his boat.  However, his life preserver was stuck underneath his boat.  This is where our challenge came in.  The children had to work as a team to get the life preserver out from under the boat, get it on Fred, and flip his boat back over…all without letting poor Fred sink.  They only had four small metal tools, and could not injure (stab) Fred, or touch him with their hands.  It took a few tries, but almost all teams were successful when they listened to each other, and worked together.  This proved to be a very frustrating challenge for many.  However, I was impressed at how many teams did a nice job of working together to accomplish their goals.

         

 

Phew…the children had to work pretty hard, but they accomplished their goal of twenty class points.  We have been working on showing expected bobcat behavior in the classroom, and throughout the school.  The children voted, and chose to make slime, as their reward.  Oh boy  Now, I’ve made a lot of playdoh in my lifetime, however, I had never made slime.  But, if this is what the children wanted, then I thought it was a perfect opportunity to meet our science standards and learn about states of matter. 🙂  This actually was a super fun activity.  It was fun to see the kids have a blast, during a well deserved reward.

What better way to get ready for the weekend, than to do some experiments with Peeps?..

So…since the focus was on states of matter, I thought, why not experiment with states of matter with this friendly Easter candy.  We set out to learn about changing states of matter, and to determine what a reversible and irreversible state would be.  To demonstrate this, we heated, froze, and worked on dissolving marshmallow Peeps.  It was a lot of fun to see what happened to the poor little chicks and bunnies during these experiments.  The children had a lot of fun, and learned some new things.

 

here are the before:

and…here are the after:

This poor vinegar peep had nothing left but his eyes.