Cocoa Dolphins

We have been working on our city a lot! There continued to be a lot of work on measurement, cutting walls, hot gluing, and painting (including using paint tape and painting solar panels on walls). Moving forward in our block we assigned a mode of transportation to each student.
As our city buildings come close to being finished we will be adding landscaping, roads, byways, and paths and perhaps a beach front and harbor! This all connects and segue into our transportation studies including some fantastic videos about future transportation. Check out Wallanius Wilhelmsen’s E/S Orcelle- the green flagship. It is an amazing model to consider! It utilizes fuel cells, wind, solar and wave power….wow!
We worked with Mrs. Baldwin’s class on one occasion; some will continue to work with them as they build models. This transportation segment along with the city will continue to build and layer. We will, of course, be building models of the various things. Our focus in the next weeks will be on the history of transportation, the physics behind various modes of transportation (lift, drag, thrust, buoyancy, types of energy, simple machines etc.). We have already talked about wheels, and gears. We will also be learning about associated inventors and their background and culture. We are working on a field trip to Wings Over The Rockies to connect to many elements of our transportation studies! It’s an amazing place!
We are getting into some very meaningful sections of our chapter book…The Princess and the Goblin. The symbolism is amazing! The concepts of living in the light, living in darkness, faith, hearing Holy Spirit, recognizing the Holy Spirit, Being healed and washed clean (baptism), believing without seeing….etc. Ask your Cocoa Dolphin about it.
We are also going to be working on writing our stories. They will be learning more about developing characters, settings, and plot. This will be an extensive process, they will be writing a full rough draft and final copy, complete with illustrations. We will publish the books at RAFT (they will be laminated and bound with a spiral binder).
Math (and Science) is being integrated into many elements of our day. Today we made predictions and measured the snow fall in the morning and just before the end of the day. We talked about the concept of “average” as well. We will read the book “Snowflake Bentley” to learn the science and math related to snowflakes (patterns/tessellations etc.). Math time has many looks; we continue to read math literature…books that are directly focused on the concepts we are working on. Many kids are working on various activities having to do with patterns. Some made stop motion animation of patterns and some worked with 100’s charts to find patterns when counting by 2’s, 3’s, 4’s etc. We have done some origami and will continue to utilize that to learn more geometry. We have also integrated a lot of conversations and drawings about fractions (some related conversations about percentage).
I would like to make a new pattern for our meeting of the minds conferences (coming up already next week!).
Rather than have a goal setting conference with the children present, I would like to meet with just parents so I can learn more about your goals for your children, and share my observations and thoughts about where they are and where we would like them to be ‘going’.

Please remember to send a paint shirt…I am a billboard for how terribly acrylic paint stains!

Onward with joy:)
Nancy

Hi all,
We are going to begin building our city/buildings this week! The process of planning and building a city has been valuable on many levels. In order to make a ‘healthy’ city there has been a lot of conversation and thoughtful planning. We have measured, used grids and graph paper, learned about organizing information, made graphs, built footprints of our buildings, created our habitat and mountain background. We have more to learn about measurement including some work with fractions and proportion/scale. Many thanks to John Basso who talked to the kids about architecture last week…we learned important information and it was great timing!

We will be using Gesso and acrylic paints this week so BEWARE:) Gesso WILL stain; it is a thick white medium used to prepare artists canvases. We will use it to cover cardboard etc. so it can be painted. Acrylic paints stain as well but the “Oxy” stain removers can be effective. PLEASE bring old over sized t-shirts for the kids to use as paint shirts!!

Our transportation theme (block # 2) has begun with a brainstorming session about the many forms of transportation. We will be using our graphing skills again to organize our transportation lists. We found a bunch of great books on our trip to the library..and more came from a trip to Bookies (the greatest bookstore for kids/teachers/learning!). There will be many integrated activities…some to be formed as the kids inquire and wonder. We will be making a transportation time line and hopefully will bring in some geography with a “farm to table” project (more details to come). Our city has a variety of transportation options and eco-friendly elements that will be created after our buildings are in place.

We are working on a trip to NREL (National Renewable Energy Lab). This may need to happen on a school day other than a Friday. It’s a wonderful learning environment and we will need more time than a Friday afternoon allows. More details coming soon! Many thanks to Meredith Woodrow for working on this trip (and others to come:)!

Ask your children about what is happening in “The Princess and the Goblin”. Ask them what they think about the ‘moon’ in the great-huge-grandmothers room.

See you tomorrow:)

Nancy

Hello Cocoa Dolphin families:)
A couple things…listening to the AA students share their city project was truly awesome, and lots of fun. Our class/city plan received lots of kudos from the ‘big’ kids. One of them even said he felt that we did a better job than the eighth graders…wow.
Tomorrow morning (Thursday), John Basso is going to share some of his architectural knowledge with us. This is perfect timing since our city planners have done amazing work and are ready to begin building. We are also diving into the world of transportation…and can’t wait to add roads, walking paths, and biking trails through-out the city to accommodate our creative vehicles, and Eco- friendly transportation plan. So far we are considering a combination of fossil fuel powered, and renewable energy powered vehicles. If any of you have access to some ‘high’ power magnets…it would be great to experiment with the idea of magnet powered vehicles!

Don’t forget to read your child ‘notepad’ on their iPad…we are working hard to write entries every day.
Lots to do….and 3:15 always comes too soon!

Happy Friday…and the first day of fall! It’s been a busy week. On Monday reworked on our body tracings. Most dolphins worked on their ears. As we have done for each body part or system we first describe what we do, or like to do with our (ears), then we look up scripture and describe what God has to say about our ears/listening/hearing. We started the chapter book, The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald. We are loving this book! Tuesday we worked on our mouths. Wednesday we collaborated on beginning our box city Thursday we made our own city maps on grids. This was an amazing process; with only a short conversation the previous day about fossils fuels…these kids came up with awesome city plans, most of which had very well thought out energy sources. Today we did some measuring. We read about the size of the ark and made our own cubits. (did you know that cubits are the size of your elbow to the tip of your index fingers). we are working on understanding standard measurement. We will begin our city planning and building.next week. We will also be working on some haiku poetry and some new games using polyhedral dice. We will also be working on our goals and plans for our Meeting of the Minds conferences. I am asking for somewhat longer conference times so we can cover/discuss more information and questions. If the longer time is an issue please know I understand and you are free to stay with the standard timing. Happy Ice-blocking!! Nancy and the Cocoa Dolphins
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