After we got over our fascination with worms, someone else mentioned clouds and so this last week, we’ve spent looking at the clouds.  One of the first misconceptions they had was that clouds were air/wind.  So we did some experiments to determine that clouds are not in fact air or made up of air:

I made Wind Bags out of items that were around my room:

Here’s a list of what was in the bag:

2 straws

small envelope

car

plastic duck

foam pumpkin shape

paper cup

square of tissue paper

stryofoam ball

feather

clear food service glove

cotton ball

The idea was for the kids to move the things in the bag with air.  I just laid the bags on the tables and said, “Make the things in your bag move”. There were some interesting solutions.

After about 20 minutes of the children moving the materials around, we got back together and made a list of all the ways we moved each of the things.  The one common thing was that everyone had tried blowing on all of the items to get them to move.

We then discussed all the things that air could help us do: move things, carry seeds, blow up balloons, help us drink out of straws, move weather to us or away from us.

The next day, I challenged the children to find a way to make a piece of paper stick to their tummies  without using their hands, chins, tape, or by sitting down.  After about 20 minutes, only a few of the children had come close to an answer, so I showed them how we walk quickly and air would hold the paper to us.  Then we all tried it:

They would start out by holding on to the paper and then once they started running, they would let go.

After I had convinced everyone that clouds are not air, we moved on to learning more about clouds:

We observed them in the sky on several different days either from in our room (we has several days of severe thunderstorms) or from outside on the playground.  We also made a KLO chart, but in a little different order from the usual KWL chart.

The K was first to determine what they Know, then the L to find out what they wanted to Learn, and the O was after we observed some things about clouds.

We are still in the process of filling in the O portion:

Here are some of the books we have read:

I’ll post some more things from this week later on.  Next week is our last full week of school, then just two more days after that! 🙂

Kristen 🙂