“The students are curious and creative, so to finish the term I designed a weather project that would incorporate different disciplines from the primary syllabus,” said Maestra Annamaria.
The students learnt a poem about the seasons and enjoyed pretending to be the tree that lost its flowers and leaves. Adding movement and gestures to the poem helped the students to remember the words.
The students also learnt how to express weather vocabulary with different painting techniques. For the wind, the students blew in a straw to make a pattern with thick paint. For the rain, students used water paint strokes and for the snow students dabbed cotton wool to create a soft effect. The class created some masterpieces!
With help from Beatrice in the High School science lab, the students became scientists and conducted an experiment with cotton wool, water, a tea strainer, a dropper and some fun blue dye. First the students held in their hands “una nuvola leggera” without water, then they filled their pretend cloud with water and held “una nuvola pessante.”
The second part of the experiment was to test how many drops made the pretend clouds heavy enough to make rain.
Together the class counted the drops in Italian and all the children had turns of dropping the blue water on the cotton wool. Finally the class was able to say “la pioggia!” as the blue liquid dropped from the clouds in the tea strainer.
To complete the science activity the children drew a picture of the experiment and labelled the equipment in Italian.
Part of the science adventure this week was making a thermometer. Building on the students’ knowledge of celcius and farenheit, the handmade thermometer allowed students to equate numerical value to learnt expressions about hot and cold.
Kindergarten students love movement so the Peace Garden was the perfect place to play a game with movement and weather dice.
The movement dice commanded some students to run, walk, crawl, hop, skip and jump to their correct weather station. The dice rolled and the students moved and verbalised what was on each dice. The race was on to see which weather station had more children.
Who said “the weather” was just small talk!?