Dear Studio Blue,
We noticed you have been thinking about ways to take care of the baby dolls and your birds. You are finding materials that will protect and keep them safe. You have many questions and you are listening and learning from each other when you ask questions. You watch one another closely and try other's ideas while we play inside Studio Blue and outside too!
Cassie: Too many animals!
Vivian: Let’s dump them all in!
Cassie: Yea!
Jemima: It’s a bed. For babies.
Does it keep the baby safe?
Jemima: Yes. The blocks. The blocks are protecting them.
Kairan: It’s a nest. The green thing is something he can play with. William gave me it.
Cassie and Vivian, you notice Kairan’s bird’s nest and you both get your birds. You add blocks to your structure and then place your birds into the new part of your building. Soon, there are blocks covering your birds so they are no longer visible to anyone. We hear, This is so the birds won’t get eaten.
Cassie: We need to cover these because the hawk is going to eat them.
Vivian: And the babies!
Arlo, you found a way to protect your bird. You did it like this:
Arlo, you told us one morning that it was loud in Studio Blue. You are holding your bird and soon, you have found a way to help your bird.
Arlo: My bird was protecting from the loud. I put something under so it would protect. From the noise of the airplane.
Camden, you found a way to keep your bird safe, even if it has an adventure in a rocket that you have built for it.
Camden: This is a rocket for my bird. The bird can fly and the rocket can fly. If the bird falls, the rocket can catch him.
Mark Making
Joe, you were sitting at the markers table and chose a pink marker to create with. You said, some cheese and then you pretended to eat the cheese from your paper. You lifted the marker up and down many times from your paper to the air above. You said, Dots. So many dots. You stopped to look closely at your dots. You saw one dot, in particular, and pointed to it. Oh, he's sad. Who is sad? Diane wondered. Joe, you said. Is that Joe when he's sad? This time, you said, Dot. Dot is sad.
Will, you had been watching Joe draw. A few minutes later, you used the pink marker to draw this picture.
I did that and then I did that and then I put some dots. It’s not the same because I just made it this way.
It looks just like the picture Joe had just made!
Camden, you were very curious about something this week. You were looking at the pictures of red-tailed hawks on the wall.
You brought Diane over, saying,
Come here. I need to show you something. Come with me.
Camden, you pointed to something that the hawk in the picture appears to be holding.
What is this thing behind the hawk? You asked.
Do you mean this? Under the hawk? That it is holding?
Yes.
Here are some ideas you had.
Will: It’s a baby hawk...because it has a beak.
Arlo. It’s an acorn.
Camden: It’s a crab. Like this. (He holds up his hands like a crab’s claws.)
Arlo continues to look at the picture and he has more thinking to share. It’s an egg. I think it’s an egg that didn’t hatch a baby hawk.
William: Maybe a pine cone?...Maybe its nest?
Arlo: I think my bird has an idea. A hawk is like a bird. My bird has an idea.
No cars can go on nestes...because it’s too high.
Cars should NOT go on nests.
Camden: This is my bird house.
The next day, we wonder again…
Arlo: A baby bird not hatching from its egg.
Dax: A baby.
Jemima: I think it’s a daddy lizard.
Alice: Match. Match - Match. (Alice points to the object we are wondering about and then points to a creature, the Red Eft, in the Wild About Lincoln Pocket Naturalist Guide hanging up near the hawk picture).
The story of an egg
Dax, you found an “egg” in the ground and couldn’t get it out with your shovel. Luckily, William was there and was able to dig it out with his fingers, then give it to you. Thanks, William! Then you showed it to Camden and told him it was an egg.
Later, on the playground, you were still thinking about eggs. Here’s a video of you and Alice having a long play.
Sculpture Park Walks
The weather was so lovely, we just had to walk in the sculpture park!
On Thursday, Arlo, Jemima, Kairan, Dax and Ferdinand went out with Mark.
Kairan, you looked under the Silver Car and saw a plug – sure enough, there was a wire going to it. What could it be for? To make the car go, you said. Arlo had another idea – to make the music and pictures play.
We stopped on the steps of the museum (where you all asked to have your picture taken) on the way to Watershed. At Watershed, Mark picked you up to look in the hole where the water comes out. Some of you noticed that your voice sounded different when you talked into the hole.
When we got to the tubes, we found a bug that was really interesting. If you touched it it would curl up like it was dead, so you had to wait a while for it to put its feet out again and start crawling. Jemima, you found a home where you could leave it on the way back to the classroom.
During Tuesday's sculpture park with the whole class, you walked and moved in all different ways. Some of you noticed each other and tried moving in the same ways.
Jemima: I'm a grasshopper.
You crawled, ran, jumped and hopped across the stones on the path. Augie, you noticed that some stones looked like squares and some looked like triangles. Some of you had to jump to get from one stone to another without touching the dirt. Kind of like a game!
Jemima and Kairan, you found pinecones – some small and some big!
Pinecones can be big or small, and they're still pinecones...
...kind of like tomatoes!
When Ferdinand’s mom, Liz, brought tomatoes for snack, we looked closely at them at meeting. Are all these tomatoes? Even the orange one? The yellow one? Tomatoes can be different colors, and they’re still all tomatoes. (At snack, William wanted to know if the orange and yellow tomatoes tasted different, and then Will tried them too.
I wonder what you found out?)
Our birds are the same and different! They’re all birds, so they’re all the same. But they have different colors, so they’re different! One thing we noticed is that they have different colors of beaks. Jemima and Will, your birds have the same color beak – gray – and Blue Bird has a black beak. And some beaks are brown, and some are pinkish. Some beaks are thick and some are thin.
What else is the same and different?
