Cedar Tower Explorations
/Students were delighted to get to play on the new Cedar Tower structure this week during outside times. The tower structure has multiple entrance points and provides a cool view of the garden roof of our gazebo. Students have enjoyed scaling the climbing net, swinging from the monkey bars, and creating structures in the covered tunnel area. While rain did not hamper our enjoyment of the new structure, it put a pause on some of our planting projects. We originally planned to begin sketching and researching the plants in our cedar classroom and planting in our gardens this week. In addition, Mark was planning to come give a tree climbing demonstration. These projects have been postponed until next week. Instead, this week we've been carefully observing our plant seeds and exploring NSTA’s digital book Peeking Inside Plants. Through this interactive book we learned that plants use water, sunlight, and air to make their own food in a process called photosynthesis. We learned that plants use some of this food to grow and they store the rest of it. We will continue learning about plants next week. This week we noticed that all of our painted lady caterpillars have now formed their chrysalises. In addition, we began learning how to play chess. We read a book called Story Time Chess that described an imaginative background story behind each different chess piece. The background stories described how each chess piece moves and why it moves that way. Now that we've learned about all the different chess pieces, we are excited to begin playing chess during project time.
