Nursery

For several weeks in January- which included a few snow days- we had fun with hands-on explorations of the concepts of hot and cold. We heated ice to watch it melt and saw steam rise up from the pan. We put the pan outside in the snow and when we checked on it later- it was frozen again!

The children took turns dunking their hands in bowls of lukewarm water, very warm water, and ice water and experienced how the lukewarm water could feel either warm or cool depending on whether their hands had been previously been soaking in very warm or very cold water. This is a fun experiment to try at home.

We also tested a variety of materials to see if any of them would help to melt bowls of snow. Dirt and sand didn't change anything, but it was fun to see what happened to the snow with the salt poured on top. Melting ice with salt was an important part of our last- and tastiest- experiment having to do with hot and cold. We noticed that when the salt starts to melt the ice that the temperature of the ice water actually gets even colder! This came in very handy for us as we made our own ice cream. Yum!

For much of December and January, students throughout our Early Childhood division were engaged in learning about some aspect of robotics. Regardless of grade level, the core ideas were the same:

Computers and robots are machines.
They only work when they have a power source and can only do what people program them to do.
They do whatever you tell them to do- even if you make a mistake and give them the wrong directions. They don’t know what you meant to do or what would make sense. They just follow the the steps of your program.
A program is a set of directions that are in a specific code or language that the computer or robot has been designed to use. There are different kinds of codes used for different machines and different purposes.
Each command, or piece of information, that is entered into the computer or robot (called “input”) causes a specific, predetermined response (called “output”)

In Nursery, the children were introduced to our Kibo robots. Kibo is programmed by scanning different bar codes- like the UPC codes used for labeling items for sale. By connecting blocks imprinted with different codes corresponding to specific actions, they were able to physically construct a sequence of commands- or program.

These blocks are connected to make a sequence of commands. The program tells the robot to beep, shake three times, then spin.

Throughout the month of November, the children in our Nursery class have been observing and exploring changes in the natural world as we transition through the fall and begin thinking about the coming winter. We have spent the past several weeks learning about different ways that animals prepare for the cold by finding or building warm homes and gathering and storing food. Students also learned about how some animals stay warm by growing a different type of fur in the winter months, how some rely on added body fat to insulate them from the cold, and how some others choose to migrate to warmer places and avoid the cold altogether.

Some of the books we have enjoyed reading together and learning from include: In the Middle of Fall, by Kevin Henkes, A Bed for the Winter, by Karen Wallace, and It's Moving Day! by Pamela Hickman. All are available in the Gordon School library!

The children also created several cozy burrows for our classroom collection of woodland animal finger puppets, complete with tunnels, leaves, and straw.

In the Nursery class, students have been practicing making observations about and distinctions between the properties of different objects in our world.

We have used magnifying glasses (hand lenses) and a high-powered magnifying camera to examine a variety of different materials- making connections between patterns we observed and the textures we could feel on various objects. After reading the book, Close Closer Closest- by Shelley Rotner and Richard Olivo, the children sorted pictures of some of the objects we had examined by whether the photo was a close, closer, or the closest view of the object. An example is shown in the frame below.

We have also been exploring other properties of materials- comparing "larger and smaller" and "heavy and light".

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