The Honeybees spent the entire month of February in space, but this week we’ll travel back in time and begin to play with the dinosaurs.
How could we leave space with the exciting landing of the Mars Rover Perseverance coming up? Space + Robots! We have watched the landing over and over and the Honeybees certainly have a focus on Mars. The kids have amazing questions and ideas about this space robot.
Here’s a video about the way the Rover was designed.
They watched this many times and would probably love to watch it with you.
The Honeybees cheered along every time that they saw mission control celebrating the landing.
Many weeks ago we learned about the International Space Station, and this is the video tour we looked at. Many of them would like to show their parents this video. They learned that the ISS orbits the earth 220 miles above us and moves at 17,227 miles per hour. We learned that space scientists from many countries around the world work together. Seeing this video really helped us understand the concept of gravity. Suni Williams gives a great tour and answers so many questions about space travel.
The Honeybees have had many opportunities for dramatic space play in February. We constructed our own box rocket and Rover. Our Rover was definitely controlled by young astronauts.
The projector was a great way for the kids to experiment with creating our own outer space to play and pretend in.
This is a space projecting night light. {We all want one for our room}
We continued to layer on paint for our outer space mural and added some jewels for sparkling stars. I just give them bowls of beautiful colors and they do the rest. The results are just incredible.
We are still requesting Rocketship Run by Laurie Berkner. They request it as a clean up song, but it’s really best for a dance party. They loved having alumni Honeybee Arya with them while her mama was our sub last week.
I’m sure you have seen our other great passion interwoven into our space stories….CATS. They fly on our rockets and inhabit our dollhouse. This week we are creating a mama cat and eleven kittens from a community painting project.
We have read a lot of books about space, both fiction and non fiction. This past week we used telescopes to check out the beautiful illustrations in “What Miss Mitchell Saw” She discovered a comet in 1847. Maybe we can use a telescope to check out the moon outside during the day sometime.
I’ve had stomp rockets in my car for an entire year waiting to to another space unit. We loved launching our own rockets over and over again. The Honeybees experimented with how to place the rocket for the biggest burst of air and the angle that we held the launcher.
At least half of us say we’d like to do this one day.
I’ve ordered this wonderful book for us and it should arrive on Tuesday. Then we’ll put together our own Mars Rover, complete with a Martian and an astronaut. {Thanks for the CDs everyone!}
As always, let me know if you have any questions and concerns about the classroom or your child.
I’m going to clear four weeks for summer camp at school this week. I need to check in with the church, and I’ll have a sign up sheet. Anna Spraker is going to be doing all of these camps with me. I’m also cooking up a camp adventure at Glade Road Growing and Heritage park for ages 5 and up.
Thanks so much for keeping up with the clean clothes, coats, boots, and mittens. Even as it warms up we are still going to need some of this gear for our first recess at 9:30. I really can’t wait to be outside more and more. The Honeybees have been finding all sorts of signs of spring. There is even a ground hog hole near our backdoor, and the kids have been shouting to the groundhogs. {I bet the groundhogs have moved!}
