Time flies when you're having fun
Welcome back to the Red band blog! Our second arc began with an exploration with movement around our community. The Red band covers quite a bit of land and water each day during their journey to school. Some of us take cars, BART, or our two feet to get to school each day and we all walk up and down our block to spend time in both the Hive and Orchard. In order to track this movement we began our by-land study with mail. We asked how many days it would take to send a letter from 1920 Bryant to 1960 Bryant Street. We measured from our door to the post office and back and the distance between our two doors. Our 20 minute walk took three days by mail. If we are so close, how could it take so long? We mapped our experience then added our homes to the map. Creating a scale with our hands we found who lives closest and furthest to school and everyone in between before we sent ourselves a letter home. Based on our predictions we expected this to take anywhere from two to seven days for our letters to reach us.
November also brought National Novel Writing Month to us. I don't know if you've picked up on this but the Red band loves animals and some of our favorites happen to travel by land: banana slugs, foxes, wolves, hedgehogs, zebras, cows, coyotes, and reindeer. Writing a novel is a pretty tall order when you're learning to write so the band took a new approach, we would write a play starring our motley crew of animals. The kids set out to write a puppet show filled with animal journeys and encounters, then created another new entry for themselves filled with masks, stuffies, and costumes. To help our story building we went to the Cal Academy to visit two reindeer, Velvet and Tinsel, the farthest traveling land animals. These two particular reindeer, we learned, travel via horse trailer to spend some time in San Francisco. While our play transformed into the movement of tiny humans building a kid-sized puppet theater for themselves, complete with gold curtains and a hidden door, we will mark it as a success and continue to unfold the animals' story.
The movement of mail inspired us to take a closer look at the vehicles that help move people and their things. We started by continuing the mail route via trains. We studied the movement of trains by dissecting their parts. Our attempt to create our own train cart ended with a disassembled engineer box, but led us to the Railway Museum searching for answers on how these are constructed and what powers them. Then a lesson on combustion came with a visit from Rich, a model engine, and a big flame.
The Hive has been buzzing with projects all year; by-land has given us the opportunity to explore simple machines and pulleys, car and bus washes, topographical maps, and fences. Up next we have a covered wagon and Lego-hauling gondola - so stay tuned.