Here's one snippet from what Ms. Eda did with the children this week.
Chemistry:
We introduced chemistry as a type of science that studies matter. We talked about the elements in the nature and how different they are in terms of their properties. We touched and felt two elements, gold and aluminum and talked about their differences. We looked at the periodic table and what it is about and then we read a book about matter and forms of matter (solid, liquid and gas). We discussed examples of all the types of matter and found how these forms exist in our bodies (e.g. solid:bones, liquid: blood, gas:air in the lungs). We touched, smelled, and even tasted different types of matter including lemon juice, salt, baking soda, alcohol and vinegar.
We later demonstrated how chemical reactions occur when we mix some elements. (Vinegar + baking soda --> Chemical reaction that creates a new matter which is gas).
To make it fun, we loaded a ziploc bag with a lot of vinegar and baking soda and sealed it and shook it and saw how the bag got filled with air and popped..
Also discussed safety. Did role playing on how to respond when a stranger talks to us. What an emergency is, and what we need to do when there is emergency. Calling 911 and getting help.
I am talking about a culture of schooling in which more importance is placed on exploration than on discovery, more value is assigned to surprise than to control, more attention is devoted to what is distinctive than to what is standard, more interest is related to what is metaphorical than to what is literal. It is an educational culture that has a greater focus on becoming than on being, places more value on the imaginative than on the factual, assigns greater priority to valuing than to measuring, and regards the quality of the journey as more educationally significant than the speed at which the destination is reached. I am talking about a new vision of what education might become and what schools are for. — Elliot Eisner, What Can Education Learn from the Arts about the Practice of Education?
It's been really exciting and refreshing to have some daddies come up and do the parent shift. I'm grateful that we have the community we do. A friend of mine shared this article with me and it really does ring true. There is a wonderful energy that men bring when working with children.
