Airport Security

For the last several years we have toured our local airport.  One part of the tour that was emphasized last year was some of the security.  This year I wanted to provide an experience so the children would understand it better.
    
But it’s not the security that we experience as travellers but from an
                       airport worker’s position.
               
The worker wears an identification card and swipes to access certain areas.  At some doors their fingerprint has to be scanned before the door opens.
 
Alex showed us how he has to swipe his card then scan his finger to open this door.  Several us scanned our fingers but it didn’t work for us.
  
      
We haven’t talked about fingerprints at school before so this year I came prepared for the children to make their fingerprint as a starting point to further discussions.
             
     Pressing their finger on to the ink pad then on to their paper,
  
 
  gave them a chance to see the tiny lines that make up their print.
                   
I wish I had brought magnifying glasses after seeing this child pull out his
                       flashlight to get a closer look.
     
    I’ve added my fingerprint to our control tower back at the school. 
           This may lead to discussion and further explorations.

The Paper Airplane

                 

One our families love making airplanes and I consider them an expert at making paper planes.  They’ve made lots of different planes at school.  So today they helped us understand the plans on the back of this book.
                         
After reading The Paper Airplane, which is about a boy who pretends that his paper airplane is flying with the birds, we made our own planes and flew them in the gym.
   
          
                
           The gym gave us lots of space to fly them again and again.

Airport Control Tower

Last week the children arrived back from Spring Break to find an addition
                             to the ticket centre.
      
              An airport control tower was built inside.
 
                    Our room now had a train, a bus and
    
an airplane.  With all that possible traffic we needed a control centre.
 
A family had donated the old radio, which has lots of knobs to turn and a microphone.  I added the keyboard and light box. 
                  
The light box is our pretend radar system – the pegs are the planes in the air.
   
     Binoculars were a necessity for keeping an eye on the skies
 
because there have been lots of flights arriving and departing everyday.
 
A mix of passengers have flown here and there and hearing the safety talk by the attendant is important.  The children have demonstrated their knowledge of flying while playing.  Friday we are heading to the airport for a field trip where we’ll compare and learn more.

It has been exciting to be able use our big cardboard boxes in many ways.  First a castle then ticket centre and finally a control tower.  Are we done?

Pond Study–week 2

This morning we closed early again to go visit our pond.
    
Our first job was to check the level of the water in the pond
          to see if it had receded in the past week.
         
I brought various measuring tapes for the children to use.
 
Happily most of our sticks were where we left them but we
  were so surprised to see the change in the water level.
  
My first thought was “our measuring tapes aren’t long enough”
         so quickly decided to use our feet to measure.
  
Each child walked heel-to-toe from stick to water counting their steps.
 
Then drew a picture of the pond and wrote the number of steps in
                       their nature books.
 
We finished off by moving our sticks to the new water line and
        predicted where the water might be next week.

 
Our second job was focused on how trees change in the spring.  The children
were given a popsicle stick with their name on it.  They had to find a tree that
        they liked and place their name stick at the base.
   
We took a picture of each child showing the leaf bud on their tree. 
The photo will be added to their Nature Book and we’ll be able to
use the photo to compare the growth when we visit next week.

Feeding our Worms

“Environmental chefs

here’s a recipe for you’'

to fix from scratch

to mix a batch

of Compost Stew”.

That is the main stanza in the book “Compost Stew” by Mary McKenna Siddals.  We read it at story time this morning then we made our own compost stew.
                              
We started with our compost bucket that sat over the weekend.  It had banana peels, egg shells, coffee grounds and a few tomatoes from this morning.
                 
              The children took turns stirring it and crushing the egg shells.
                 
                    Then we added it to our worm composter.
              
Covered it with paper again and sprayed it with water till it was good and moist.   We’ll check tomorrow to see if the worms have been working through their meal.