It's been a busy couple of weeks, as we settle in to our new routine together. Friday marked a huge shift for me, because my afternoon class is now significantly smaller. It's hard to say goodbye to any student, but I'm hopeful that the new class arrangements will work out for everyone concerned.
I'm looking forward to meeting many of you at the Teacher/Parent BBQ on Thursday and giving you the classroom tour. As a prelude to that, I thought I might talk about some of the learning we're already seeing in the classroom.
Last week, a student brought in a wasp's nest that her family found in the backyard.
When we talked about the nest, students were confused about the differences between wasps and bees and there is a fair amount of overlap: both can sting you and are often black and yellow.
Two major differences came out in our discussion that some of the kids already knew about: bees are less likely to sting and they make honey.
I used this as a jumping off point to learn more about bees and other insects and brought in some honey comb to share with the class:
In the photo above, you can see a student investigating the honeycomb and some of the tools provided to help: magnifying glasses, plastic shapes to compare the comb with, one of the books about bees we've looked at, and a beeswax candle.
We noticed that it was arranged in hexagons, just like the wasps nest.
When you chewed it, there was something left in your mouth after you'd eaten the honey, which was wax.
So we asked: what other things are made from wax? And other students brought in things like lip balm, a bees wax candle and some face cream. We looked carefully, touched them, smelled them (but didn't taste) and then tried to describe how they felt and looked.
On Friday, we started to make drawings of some of the other bugs the students knew so we could understand more about insects in general. I'll keep you posted as this investigation continues.
Sincerely,
Ms. Goegan
