Wind Chimes, Sukkot, and Timelines!

Wind Chimes

As you know, to really explore different types of sounds, the Primary students created wind chimes using odds and ends of materials. They chose their materials and then sketched a plan for how they would use their materials.

Mrs. Hoy demonstrated tying the objects to the base and making sure to space them so each item is hitting the others and creating sounds.

Next, it was time to get to work!

Mrs. Hentschel's class graciously offered to help us with the tying!

The finished wind chimes will be on display during conferences!

Sukkot

Hazzan Greenburg and Mrs. Mangel were kind enough to host lunch in their sukkahs. We had a wonderful time!

Timelines:

For the past few weeks, I have been focusing on different ways of measuring time. Time can be measured in years, months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds. A librarian from Wright Memorial Library came and read us a few books about time around the world and a timeline of technology/inventions.

Here we are putting the months in order:

Here they are working on putting cars in order by year on a timeline: 

They also worked on putting events in order from the lives of famous people such as MLK, Jr., George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and the Pilgrims.

They used sequencing words to put these phones in order!

During the past week, the kids have been engrossed in creating their personal timelines. First, they organized their photos. 

Then, they wrote their rough drafts and made revisions. Finally, they are working on completing their final drafts using their neatest handwriting. 

Such hard workers!

You will get to see their finished timelines on display at the performance on November 17th!

Exploring our Senses: Touch & Taste

Touch

Our sense of touch is the most forgotten but also the most often used since our touch receptors are in the skin all over our bodies! Of course, we started by creating a list of words that describe things we can touch.

 To explore this sense, students got into groups and described an object in a bag using only their sense of touch. They described the shape, texture, and size to try to get their peers to guess the object. 

Taste

We brainstormed a list of words to describe taste and then began learning about the tongue! 

We learned that the tongue is a muscle--and therefore, can be used to do some pretty silly tricks!

We learned about four different types of tastes: sweet, bitter, sour, and salty. The students had a chance to taste 4 different liquids and determine into which category it went. 

(The mystery liquids were: lemon juice, sugar water, salt water, water with baking soda)

We talked about "the face" of sour. If you make a pucker face when tasting it, then it's probably sour!

The final results! It seems identifying sweet, salty, and sour are pretty straightforward. Determining bitter (blue post-its) was a little more challenging!

We put our taste buds to the test by sampling different foods and determining if it tasted sweet, sour, bitter, or salty. 

Food included: dill pickles, potato chips, pretzels, lemon juice, jellybeans, cocoa powder, the rind of an orange, and peppermint candy.

The faces they made throughout these tasting activities were priceless!

Five Senses

After learning about each independently, we used all five our senses to experience popcorn! We read The Popcorn Book by Tomie DaPaola while the students created booklets for recording their descriptive words. Then, Mrs. Hoy went through the process to set up the popcorn machine. Then, she plugged it in and our senses went to work!

First, we made our pinnas bigger so we could hear it better.

Then came the popping! So much popping! And then our noses got a whiff of the delicious smell!

They each got to hold a piece to describe it using their senses of sight and touch. 

Then, finally, it was time to engage our sense of taste! Yum!

Check out all of their describing words, or adjectives!