May 30-June 3 Day 1

We began the morning with Gratitude Circle (sharing something we are grateful for). Then we went to the obstacle course for a little bit before going to the art studio for the first lesson/activity. Today was Antarctica day. We discussed the different type penguins that live in Antarctica and the explorers picked their favorite to make a clay version. We will add markings tomorrow since they needed to dry today. Then we played Belgica Antarctica Freeze tag (based on the insect native to Antarctica).

After snack and a discussion of characters for their original play, we looked at a model of Earth rotating around the Sun to understand why Antarctica has 6 months of darkness and 6 months of sunlight. Then we played Heads up, Winter is Up. We also looked at a model of the greenhouse effect to discuss what greenhouse gases are, where they come from and their affect on Earth's atmosphere. After setting up the model with a glacier, we looked at and talked about the symmetry in snowflakes and worked on a snowflake watercolor, shape symmetry art project. While waiting for the watercolor part to dry we discussed what causes the colors of light in an aurora (charged particles from solar winds excite oxygen or nitrogen in our atmosphere causing red/green light or blue/purple light). Then we played Aurora Dodgeball (like regular dodgeball except the tagger and tagged had to pull a card to see if it matched. ex: oxygen card matched to red/green light would give 1 point to that team) Then we ate lunch, played on obstacle course a bit more and went to explore the creek. We saw a skink in a tree, a Pipevine Swallowtail caterpillar, a crawfish, little salamander and more! Lastly, we played Sneaky Penguins during dismissal.