Bananas are Rolling into Spring!

 


April Study: Wheels

I'm not sure if you knew this about some of your children, but they are OBSESSED with all things that move. Whether it's playing with vehicles in the block center or spinning on the saucers outside, they love things that move! At the end of our buildings study, we allowed the students to vote on our next study and they had the choice between Water, Clothes, or Wheels and they overwhelmingly chose the Wheels study! 

Again, the Teaching Strategies curriculum that we use at Frankie Lemmon is meant to take what we think we know about topics and stretching it out to create a deeper learning experience that encourages discussion and questions. We start by exploring the topic and looking at what we already know about wheels, such as different kinds of wheels we see in our daily lives and how wheels help us. We talked about big wheels/little wheels, wheels that push/pull, and why some things have 1, 2, 3, or 4+ wheels. As we moved further into the topic, we investigated different kinds of wheels. We obviously think of wheels on things that move like bikes and vehicles, but what about wheels in the kitchen, like a rolling pin or pizza cutter. What about wheels on suitcases and shopping carts? We even looked at how wheels work and this was extra fun to dive into! We talked about the different parts of a wheel like the axel and the spokes and why they are important. We even went outside adn examined some wheels in the parking lot to see if we could find all the parts.

I was really impressed with how the Bananas embraced this study. They were so excited each day and were really transferring knowledge from week to week and connecting what they learned to personal experiences. We had a lot of fun doing different experiments during this study, such as why wheels are round and how slopes impact the speed of wheels. As much as we learned and we could probably extend this study, I'm so excited to learn about insects next month! 

We started our study by doing a truck memory game

One of the most popular centers was the Hot Wheels track they could build in lots of different configurations. 

We used these ramps to test how far our cars would go. Then we added different materials to see how that would impact their speed. 

We took clipboards out to the parking lot and examined wheels. We talked about what the different parts were and what the letters/numbers on the tires mean.

We incorporated fine motor skills by matching letter stickers to wheels on vehicles. 




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