We’ve been in outer space for many weeks, but this week on Valentine’s Day, we’ll be returning to Earth. At first some of us were a little anxious that we were really going to blast out of our classroom, but now we all know a significant amount of information about space exploration. I love the way we have put our own Honeybee spin on it with some wildly creative dramatic play. Did you know that there are bees and butterflies in outer space almost every day. When they saw this image of the James Webb Telescope they just knew that there were bees out there.
I don’t use a lot of media in the classroom, but I loved showing them actual outer space while we learned about the James Webb Space Telescope.
We’ve played our way through all of the planets and the Milky Way galaxy. Tomorrow we’ll put together individual solar systems made from our community painting of each planet.
We read a lot of non fiction books about space, but we also loved some playful non fiction choices. Life On Mars caught our attention. I hope your child told you about the way we can write or draw an ending for a story.
We’ll do this again with other favorite books. I love seeing their confidence grow as they draw and write more. Adding a freshly sharpened pencil and clipboard to a sensory play experience has been fun. Pre-writing starts as drawing and scribbling. While letter formation is a goal in the next few years, it’s so interesting to watch Honeybees scribbling from left to right and “reading” their words to their friends.
On Valentines Day we’ll start a short unit on Emotions as we celebrate our Friendship Day. We’ll identify our emotions and responses to our friend’s emotions. We’ll learn about our emotional “buckets”….. like the song we have been singing all year at clean up time. Our Valentine’s Bags are beautiful, and they’ll stay on top of the cubbies. The Honeybees will not bring their bags into the classroom and will look at them at home with their parents.
Hope you have had a wonderful weekend. I was hoping for snow, but I’ll settle for this Sunday with a nice fire and soup-making.
