Happy New Year!  I hope you had a restful, healthy and wonderful vacation.  It seems as though the children made wonderful memories – they were full of appreciation and had much to celebrate and share.

Our Inquiry Wonderland

3 E’s Inquiry Wonderland is Tuesday, January 14. The museum will be open from 2:15 – 2:45 and then again in the evening from 5:30 to 6:15.  We’ll invite the school so siblings are able to visit during that day.  Families are always welcome.  Please come when you can.  We are hoping that the whole class will be able to share their research, writing, display and artwork.  We realized today that the invitations sent home a few weeks ago had the 17^thas the date.  I’m sorry for the confusion and hope you noted the correct date in the past two weekly newsletters/blog.

This museum is the final presentation step in our first research and informational writing project of the year. I know I’ve written this before, but this truly is a challenging process.   When you tour the museum you’ll see that the projects reflect how diverse our class is in their interests, their awareness of outside audiences (some children find it challenging to write what they think everyone knows) and their attention to conventions like spelling and punctuation.

I think each of the children feel a sense of accomplishment.  They have learned about one of their interests in science.  They have read both print and digital resources.  They have watched videos and taken notes.  They’ve worked to organize their facts into categories to develop paragraphs.  They’ve designed and created their museum displays and magazine pages, and they created a piece of original artwork to act as museum preview.

Global Geography

This week we completed gathering facts and information about the seven continents.  We viewed National Geographic Kids Destination World videos of each continent (The links on the blog if you’d like to view them together.  They’re really great.)  We’ve also read two short books about each continent and from these resources the children have begun to gather facts and develop interests about different countries with their various cultures, pastimes and landmarks.

This will be our second informational research and writing project.  At this point in our planning process we are hoping that each child will be able to create suitcase or satchel to collect his/her souvenirs. To do this, we’d like to collect boxes for this project– any box in the shoebox or large cereal box size range would be greatly appreciated. If you have any boxes in this size range, could you please send them in? Thank you for your help.