Marble Runs

Pre-firsters have been busy designing, building, testing, and revising their marble runs!

Spanish: Fun with Sock Puppets

The girls have been learning fruits and vegetables in Spanish.  They love feeding them to Lucia, and they are learning how to talk about which ones they like and which ones they do not like.  Yesterday we made puppet shows with the app Sock Puppets.  Here is a peek at a few of the girls.

Art_Marble Run Prototypes

This spring the girls are going to make marble runs in collaborative pairs using a collection of 3D materials like plastic tubes, paper towel rolls, yogurt cups, etc. The following videos show their individually made prototypes made of paper and tape. The challenge was to have a start and a finish and a path. The process was fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, SUCCEED! 

Empty Bowls

The pre-first girls are glazing their bowls for Empty Bowls. The Empty Bowls Dinner event is Thursday, February 15th from 5-7pm. It is a very popular community event, so sign up today! 

Hour of Code

This week, your daughter participated in the Hour of Code.  “The Hour of Code is a global movement reaching tens of millions of students in 180+ countries” (hourofcode.com).  We use this as an introduction to the programming your daughter will be doing throughout the year.  Learning the basics of programming reinforces problem solving and logic skills.

In Pre-First, we learned how to use basic directions (forward, turn left, turn right, jump, and light) to control Light Bot.  Next, we will learn how to use the Kodable app to learn more about programming and in the spring, we will use path to control the Dash robots!

If you would like your daughter to explore more at home, use this link.  Please note, different activities run on different devices and are appropriate for various ages.

Spanish: Fruits

The girls have been learning how to name fruits in Spanish.  Here they are playing a partner game where they have to find the fruit their partner names.

From the Library

Pre-first started off the year in library with an old favorite Good as New by Barbara Douglass, a story in which the wise, resourceful and patient grandparent helps skeptical young Grady fix his teddy bear after a run-in with a young cousin. In fact, Grady thinks the bear ends up better than new. Next up was Leslie Muir's C.R. Mudgeon, the story of a hedgehog who is a sensible creature of habit and his new neighbor, Paprika, who spices things up. We then read Kevin Henkes' Penny series. The third installment, Penny and her Marble, sparked an interesting discussion about finding, keeping and giving.

Next we read a couple of books in which part of the story is told in one half of the book, and then the reader flips the book over to get the rest of the story. Pre-first girls called these flip books. Crescent Dragonwagon's And then it Rained, tells the story of how all the inhabitants of an apartment building adjust to very hot weather, at first enjoying it and then wishing for rain and cooler weather. "To find out what happens next", we read half way through the book, "turn the book over". There we find And then the Sun Came Out, in which the same neighbors enjoy and then grow tired of the rain and wish for the sun to return. At the end of this section, we are again instructed to turn the book over to find out what happens next...

We followed this with Aliki's Marianthe's Story One: Painted Words. Marianthe moves to a new country and a new school with new children and a different language. She tells her story and her feelings through painting. When we turn the book over we find Story Two: Spoken Memories, in which Mari has learned a lot about her new world and can tell her life stories to her classmates in words.

The girls are now checking books out (they love to swipe the bar codes themselves) and taking them home. They agree to read to their goldfish, siblings, grandparents and friends. We've talked about how to take care of library books, how to remember to bring them back to school after they've read the book a few times. Thank you for encouraging your daughters to read.