The Honey Bees :: Week 20

We dove into our third week in space this week, but we paused to celebrate Friendship Day/Valentines Day on Thursday and the 100th day of school on Friday. We missed some little bees who were out with fevers, so there will be a few more days to play on the rocket and learn one more song about the planets. I adore that some of us are still fairly sure we don’t live on planet earth because it is just too big. (Of course it is) We’ll circle back to earth in April to celebrate taking good care of this Earth, our beautiful complicated home. We painted our big sun on Friday, and on Monday we’ll stuff and stitch the center of our solar system mobile.

The rocket ship has been a great addition to our classroom, and I think that everyone has had time to spend a little time inside with the planet and star lights. The Honey Bees were inspired to write and draw on both the interior and exterior of our spacecraft. This week we’ll watch a video of the Soyuz rockets that transport astronauts and gear to the international space station.

I want to spend a day or two playing around with Van Gogh’s Starry Night, the colors, textures, and patterns of the piece. I’ll make some starry night playdough or slime and we’ll find a way to create our own starry night creations to take home.

Our next unit will begin with dinosaurs and end with volcanos. We’ll learn about three periods of dinosaur evolution and become paleontologists. We’ll learn about fossils and have an actual fossil dig… along with lots of dinosaur play and art. We’ll make an herbivore and a carnivore for our classroom and learn about the relationship between dinosaurs and modern day birds.