myGanBlog: Entering the rainforest

A look at this week:
When you walk into The Gan, the classroom may look normal. But take a few steps further inside, enter the library and you end up not only in a room where you can find books, where we read stories, and where the children can relax a little, but you also enter a rainforest! With this week’s main focus being the rainforest, we have been talking about the animals we can find in one. We even made our own snakes to put in our rainforest! For writing this week we made a class book that talks about what we see in the rainforest. This book will be continued into next week as well. For math the children focused on weighing coffee beans in our scale and also using different measuring cups to play with the beans. And while they were doing this, we also made the room smell terrific! In the block area the children used the blocks to build a rainforest. And for science we took water droppers and put a little water onto cotton balls to make rainclouds. Then the children had the opportunity to squeeze the rain out of their clouds! The children also made letters this week with a few different items. We used the coffee beans to make letters and we also made playdough snakes into letters. And when they were not busy using the playdough to make letters they were creating other rainforest animals. To bring the rainforest that much closer to the classroom we also had a special rainforest item snack by eating pineapple and coconut. Although all the children wanted the pineapple, a few did not want the coconut. However, after their friends started eating the coconut, everyone decided to try some!

Conversations from the week:
There were a few different child led conversations about the rainforest library this week. Here are a couple of them!

Upon entering the library rainforest for the first time:
Levi: Why do you have a frog like that?
Mussie: Where’s my snake?
Levi: Where’s mine?
Morah Amanda: Look for it.
Levi: Mine’s there! Mine’s in the middle.
Mussie: And mine is here, near the window.
I can touch both monkey climbing the tree.
Levi: I can touch this one.
Mussie: Why is there only one (looking at the jaguar)? Because there is only
One in the book?

Another time the lights had not been turned on in the library yet. Mussie noticed an exclaimed: It’s dark in the rainforest!

A look at next week:
The rainforest is still our main theme next week. We are going to enjoy more activities with the coffee beans including an animal find. We will be working on spelling out words using the letters in ""rainforest and also seeing how long an anaconda snake is and how far down it’s body we can jump.