What is outer space? This question has been coming up throughout the month of February and March. The theme "outer space" has lead us to a very extensive investigation about different subjects including: the moon, the sun, stars, comets, space ships, and astronauts! We are in the process of creating our own space shuttle for the dramatic play area in the community room. We also created our very own "moon face" book. And feel free to come check out the "moon box" where we pretend to be an outer space scientist!

This week we have introduced Dominoes back in our classroom! It has been so fun to figure out all the potential this game can offer to our mathematical pursuits. The pictures above show how some students where sorting the Dominoes by number displayed. Not to mention they work great as building blocks for petite, coordinated fingers!

Some Colorado Early Learning and Development Guidelines targeted include:

• Number Concepts and Quantities: The understanding that numbers represent quantities and have ordinal properties (number words represent a rank order, particular size, or position in a list.)
• Number Relationships and Operations: The use of numbers to describe relationships and solve problems.
• Initiative and Curiosity: An interest in varied topics and activities, a desire to learn, creativity, and independence in learning.
  

Self-portraits
During this activity we wondered what our faces look like. What is similar of all faces and what is unique about our own face? Each student had a mirror to closely observe their features and create their own self portrait!

Some Colorado Early Learning and Development Guidelines targeted include:

• Fine Motor Skills: The control of small muscles for such purposes as using utensils, self-care, building, and exploring.
• Symbolic Representation: The use of symbols or objects to represent something else.
• Art: The use of a range of media and materials to create drawings, pictures, or other objects.
  

It’s never too early to engage in scientific inquiry. In fact our students at NRP ask all kinds of questions and their curious minds lead us to investigate questions such as: What are we eating in the snow? Is Snow clean or dirty? This week we decided to explore these questions and we carried out a simple experiment outside our school to observe what really is in the snow we eat and is it really clean as it appears to be when frozen. As you can see in the picture above, we collected four samples of snow and after they melted we decided: SNOW is NOT CLEAN at all! Especially the snow we found next to roads and on plow hills. We asked questions, we made predictions, we observed our results and we finally made conclusions based on our observations. Science is FUN J
Encourage curiosity at home and in the classroom and together we are influencing a generation of future problem solvers and innovators!

Some of the Colorado Early Learning and Development Guidelines targeted during this activity include:

• Scientific skills and Method: The skills to observe and collect information and use it to ask questions, predict, explain, and draw conclusions.
• People and the Environment: The understanding of the relationship between people and the environment in which they live.
• Initiative and curiosity: An interest in varied topics and activities, a desire to learn, creativity and independence in learning.
• Patterns: The recognition of patterns, sequencing, and critical thinking skills necessary to predict and classify objects in patterns.