Wow! What a great end to the week we had! I was so impressed with the children this Friday! We had a busy week, getting back into routines and back on schedule. Friday is typically a little busier, but boy, the kids were on target! During the week, we did a lot of reading of nonfiction text. We practiced identifying features of nonfiction text, and gathering information from them. We also talked about the author’s purpose for writing them. The focus of these readings was force and motion. We learned some definitions for force, friction, motion, push and pull, and gravity. We will continue with these concepts this week.

For our STEM challenge, the children learned about controls and variables. We have talked about these concepts in the past, but this week we gave them a name. We will start to use this vocabulary on a regular basis with our STEAM challenges and projects. For the first part of the STEM activity, children had to test how surfaces with varying amounts of friction changed the distance and speed at which a vehicle traveled. We talked about how the controls were the kind of vehicle used, and the force used to push the vehicle. Those should stay relatively the same. We had some interesting results! Second, we tested to see how raising the height from which a vehicle traveled down a ramp would change the speed and distance the vehicle traveled. This was a lot of fun!

We ended the day with a film that reviewed all of these concepts. It was a really great way to end the week!