Summer School Begins

Don't you just love it when you put things in a safe place where you know you'll be able to find them, and then you can't find them. Not the way I would have liked to start Summer School, but we all survived and I think everyone had a good day.

Once we got settled in the classroom we work on the K and W parts of a KWL chart. K stands for Know, and the children recorded all the things they already knew about inventors and inventions. Then we moved to the W (What) and the children listed some of their questions that they would like answered. This was valuable for the teachers as we discovered some of what the students already know, which was pretty good. After that it was time for recess, which we had downstairs all together.

After recess, we did our first hands on activity for the week. We made Super Starch. If you've never made Super Starch and you're looking for a fun, if somewhat messy activity for a hot summer day or even weekend, this is great. The trick is to get the right ratio of water and cornflour. Once the mix is right, the material will solidify as long as you keep working with it, but if you hold it still in your hands, it will return to a liquid state! Have a look at the fun we had.

Yes, their hands did stay pink or yellow for a while (in fact I've still got a yellowish tinge to my hands), but as you can see, they had fun. After cleaning up, we headed back to the classroom to start building our invention vocabulary and reading our inventions book. That was really interesting. We're looking forward to reading more tomorrow.

The final activity for the day was "Grip ball". I'd bought the velcro paddles and balls some time ago in Australia, and they'd been in storage for a while, and Summer School seemed the perfect time to get them out, so I did. We don't seem to do a lot in the way of small ball skills here, so it was fun for the children to use the paddles and balls. Here's some photos of the action. See if you can spot the balls - in most cases they are a pink and green blur!

Stay tuned for more Summer School fun! By the way, I found the things I'd lost this morning and now have misplaced some other things! Aaaagh. Just as well my head is tightly attached to the rest of my body!