Wow....Just...Wow!!!

Anyone want to take a stab at building one of these for the Frog Room? The Directions are right here...

Inclined Planes are More Fun Than You Might Think...

When Francine and I get together to plan curriculum, we usually start by asking "What have the kids been passionate about/obsessed with lately." This time around, the resounding (but not surprising) answer was cars and trucks.

Cars and trucks are a perennial item in the Frog room. We may switch off the size and type of vehicle, but you can always find wheels close at hand.

We have nothing against simply rolling cars along the floor, but we figured it was time to expand everyone's horizons a little bit...

The addition of this wooden garage helped to point us in the right direction. Hang onto your hats, it's time to explore some inclined planes!!!

An inclined plane is one of the six simple machines as defined by Renaissance scientists. According to our good friend Wikipedia, simple machines are "the simplest mechanisms that use mechanical advantage (also called leverage) to multiply force"

For example, a dump truck uses leverage to move it's payload (in this case, plastic cows) from the hopper to the dumping ground.

Leonardo Da'Vinci's fantastic inventions were all based on simple machines.

Because simple machines are...well...simple, they are easy to make and offer many hands on opportunities to explore concepts in engineering, mathematics and physics.

Also, when you "multiply force" you can make things go FAST, which is super fun!

As soon as we decided to start purposefully playing with inclined planes in our classroom, we noticed that they are everywhere!
Ramps...

Slides...

Ladders...

We're having too much fun with simple machines to stop with inclined planes. Next up? Pulleys!!!

Halloween Scenes!!!!

Our last post touched on how we pull a group of children together to make a community. Well, last week we were lucky enough to unite under the banner of Halloween!

We surprised the Frogs with a classroom-gone-batty.

Our loft was transformed into a 'Bat cave' using mosquito netting recycled from our now defunct playground gazebo. The Frogs took turns spatter painting the netting earlier in the week, then we teachers hot glued fabric bats all over it. We also used some recycled TP tubes that the Frogs had painted black to make a garland of flying bats to string across the classroom ceiling.

We had a variety of pumpkin related projects available. The Frogs used paint sticks to embellish our smaller pumpkins, and we opened up a couple of our larger ones, just to see what was inside. Squishing around in pumpkin guts proved to be less enticing than it sounds, once the Frogs heard about what was across the hallway...

CHICKENS!!!!!

...Chickens with a thing for toy vehicles, no less!

One of the families in the Polliwog room surprised the kids with a visit from three of their super tolerant, (and very well house-trained) pet chickens!!! Man, there's no topping live farm animals for party entertainment!!!

After the chickens packed up and headed back to their coop, we got ready for snack. Of course, it is a long standing Frog room tradition to make the kids really work for their snacks on Halloween! First, they had to break their pretzels out of a bat-shaped pinata, then they had to go on a treasure hunt around the community room in search of apples.

All in all, the day was a great success!

And now, we will leave you with a couple of before and after videos of our Halloween sensory table project.

Here's the Before;

...and here's the After;

Enjoy!