Huckleberry Cheesecake Newsletter, 7/20/07

Dear Parents,

This week was filled with astronomical fun as the earthlings orbited about the room learning all they could about the planets, stars, astronauts and martians! Our room was loaded with a galaxy of books for more learning fun. Here are some of our favorite reads of the week: I Want to be an Astronaut, Mars, Seeing Stars, I'll Catch the Moon, I Love our Earth, The Moon, and Our Stars.

Our shining stars were particularly great at matching star shapes with their constellations such as Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, Orion, Pegasus and Taurus. Each took a turn looking through the telescope to get a close up look at each one. The awesome astronomers also did a bang-up job counting the number of stars that made up each constellation. One star we are all familiar with and love so much is the sun! We learned that the sun is a very bright star that provides our earth with warmth and sunlight each day. Around the craft table, our star studded students enjoyed creating and decorating their own unique stars.

We worked on the positional words -- above, below, on, and beside. Each Strawberry chose a card with one of these four words and then place the astronaut around the moon according to the word on the card. Later, we got up and tried to keep our blowup earth ball suspended in the air for as long as possible. We also each took a turn being the sun and earth and watched the Strawberries demonstrate how the earth orbits and spins around the sun.

We did some interesting things with "moon rocks." We pretended to be geologists while examining the rocks in muffin pans with magnifying glasses and tongs. Of course we wore our safety goggles and gloves to protect our hands and eyes from any "space dust" that made have been on the moonrocks. Touching and seeing the rocks gave us an idea to sort them by size and texture, and we created our own moon rocks by painting them with gray paint.

Lastly, it wouldn't be space talk without Mars and Martians! The Strawberries really had fun creating their own martians and creating an out of this world martian handshake much like Mork's, "na-noo na-noo." We made a groovy sponge painting of Mars and adding some Martians to the mural.

Universally, we had a great week! Next week food will make it's way to the forefront with talk of Food Groups!

Have a great weekend!

The Strawberry Teachers