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Summer Session Projects

8/16/2013

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Parker, Jorge, Malinee, Anjali, Kobi, and Julianna all completed projected related
to “The Littles,” the book series that we have been reading for the past 6 weeks.  

Parker, Kobi, Malinee, and Anjali wrote creative stories about the Littles at Prairie
Green School.  When writing these stories, the children worked on adding details to their stories, and using words to convey emotion and excitement.  One common theme was learning how to describe the environment and surroundings from the
perspective of a six inch person.  Jorge and Julianna created dioramas from a scene in the book that they read.  Jorge focused on reading for detail when creating his diorama.   He also focused on the size comparison and difference between the Littles and the other people in the story.  In addition to the diorama, Jorge also incorporated his recent family vacation to Rocky Mountain National Park and created a story about the Littles with the Park as the setting.  Julianna’s diorama was a scene from the end of the book so she decided to write a summary that included the main events in the book up to that point.  When she read the scene from the book she worked on proper phrasing, pauses, and expression.  

Claire decided to study constellations and focus her presentation on the book, “The Stars” by H.A. Ray.  The constellations she identified were The Big Dipper, The Little Dipper, The Great Square, Cassiopeia, The Twins, and Orion.  When she was on vacation in Michigan, she stayed out late
one evening to star gaze and found those easily seen in the August sky.  Orion and The Twins were not able to be seen.   Claire’s research and discovery led to understanding that we can only see part of the night sky due to the Earth’s tilt on its axis.  Claire led the kids into the gym for her presentation and her demonstration helped us all understand this challenging concept.  

Caroline wants to be an electrical engineer when she is older.  She experimented with snap circuits and decided to figure out how helicopters fly.  She had prior knowledge of the four forces which act on a airplane: thrust, drag, lift, and gravity.  She extended her knowledge by studying Bernoulli’s principle, which explains how airplanes create a lift.

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Astronomy Lab

11/13/2012

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The students and I went to visit Cornelia Lang at Van Allen hall to see a demonstration of the moon phases, answer some trivia questions and go to the roof on Van Allen to look at the sun.  The kids also got a bag of gifts from the astronomy department as I am sure you have seen them at home.  Here are the trivia questions I asked the students from Tuesday's trip... 
Cornelia – Moon and Sun

1.     Does the shadow of the earth create the phases of the moon?   No

2.     What does cause the different phases of the moon?
The sun is ALWAYS shining on half of the moon (remember:  even a full moon is only a half lit moon!) however depending on where the moon is during it’s orbit around the earth, we will only see the section of the moon that is lit. 

3.     What time does the full moon rise?  Sunset

4. What phase is it at when it rises at midnight?   Last Quarter

5.     What are the dots on the sun called and are they cooler or hotter?  Sun spots and they are cooler

6.     When we looked in the telescope Cornelia told us to look for fuzz around the outside of the sun.  What were we looking for?  Gas explosions

7.     What is the dark part of the moon and is it newer or older than the other side?   The dark areas are lava fields and that is the newer side of the moon.

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The Moon

10/18/2012

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Each night we have been looking for the moon.  We haven't seen it yet (one night we forgot and the other night was cloudy) but read a book about the Moon that gave us an understanding of why we aren't seeing it yet.  On Monday was the New Moon.  We will continue to watch for the next 27-28 nights and record it.  Then we will make models so they can show you how much they know about the moon and it's phases, seasons and who revolves around who! 

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Weather

3/30/2012

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For our weather unit, we made our own instruments.  Over spring break, Paula sent us on a scavenger hunt to find items needed to make our instruments.  We finished our weather instrument making!  The barometers showed a bit of adjustment today since the storm came through last night.  We recorded our weather during calendar time which keeps track what the weather is like (windy, sunny, thunderstorm, cloudy, etc) the temp (weather.com) and what kind of clouds are in the sky. 
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Learning about the seasons

3/7/2012

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We started by talking about the seasons.  This was part of Claire's winter unit so she was already knowledgeable about this.  I took an orange and drew the equator on it.  Then I poked toothpicks on either end to show that the earth rotates on it's axis.  We used the lamp in our room as the sun.  We discussed what it looks like in a 24 hour period (the earth rotates once around it's axis) and in a year (earth revolves round the sun once).  Jorge piped in that his mom has already taught him this as she (earth) revolved around him (the sun) while she also spun around!  The students saw how the light of the bulb reflected on the orange during the different seasons.  We went a bit further and discussed how Alaska is dark almost all day in the winter and has sunlight during the summer.  I asked BJ if he could explain the seasons to his mom using an orange and he said, "I think so.  Why?"  I explained that you truly understand something if you can explain it to another person.

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Visitors and Teachable Moments...

3/2/2012

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The Wolf's traveled to Indy to support the Iowa Women's basketball team at the Big 10 tourney so they weren't in school on Friday.  So, I took the opportunity to invite Parker and Henry to school on Friday.  What fun!  We started with imaginative play since the blocks are Henry and Parker's favorite!  Then we had Claire retell the story of Lulu's Birthday.  In the back of the book it has a recipe for Lulu's cake which Claire wanted to bake at school.  So, I took the opportunity to talk to them about white sugar and where it comes from.  Then we talked about natural sweeteners that you could use to substitute in recipes to make it more healthy for you.  We all (except Henry) tasted agave nectar, maple syrup, evaporated cane juice, Stevia and molasses.  The kids were surprised how sweet each of them tasted.  Claire described Molasses very well..."It tastes like burnt sugar"  I was impressed with their courage to try all of them.  We made the cake into cupcakes and substituted evaporated cane sugar for the white sugar and used whole wheat pastry flour rather than white flour.  While we were mixing and taking turns, I saw Henry start organizing the cupcake tins.  This prompted me to ask him to sort by color and find out what color we had the most of.  Then he started singing a rainbow song that Parker wanted to learn.  The afternoon started with snuggling on the couch with our last fairy tale read aloud.  Then this turned into acting out "The Three Billy Goats Gruff".  We did it three times so everyone could play the part they wanted.
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School of the Wild

2/23/2012

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Prairie Green Students got to spend 2 days at School of the Wild.  The first day was quite rainy.  We built a fire using a fire starter and wood we gathered.  The purpose of the fire was to boil down the sap we had collected from Paula's house.  It is necessary to boil the sap in open air because as the water gets evaporated into the air, a sticky substance would get all over your kitchen!  We boiled it down and had a tiny bit of syrup to put on our waffles the next day.  On the second day, we woke up to a world covered in snow!  The day started a little later but we made it up to Macbride and got to play in the snow.  We made another fire to build another fire to cook our waffles but this one was harder to get started because everything was wet from the snow!  The waffles tasted delicious with our homemade syrup.  After lunch it started snowing again and they were the biggest flakes we had ever seen!  It was fun catching them on our tongues.  Check out all our pictures!  By:  Jack Wolf, student

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Our baking soda experiments

10/24/2011

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On Friday, while we were putting together our lasagna garden, we had a special visitor, Allison Staak.  She read The Magic School Bus Gets Baked in a Cake and the children were intrigued with the chemical reactions they talked about in the book.  Monday, Allison was our substitute and brought some materials to conduct our own experiment.  We used plastic bottles and put vinegar in them.  Then we put some baking soda in a balloon and covered the top of the bottle.  We made predictions and conducted our experiment allowing the baking soda to fall into the vinegar.  This was a great example of how our three different levels of kids are able to participate.  Check out each child's response!
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    Author

    Laura Wolf is the mother of three children who have attended  Prairie Green.  Currently, Lucy is in her final year at PGS while her older boys attend West High School.  She has also taught grades 3rd-5th and is a media specialist.

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