Stephens College Children's School

This past week we have been learning about Ancient Egypt. Egyptians painted Gods and birds on stone, inside the pyramids and on their sarcophagi.

They had different heads for Gods, like an eagle, lion…they also draw lots of other animals like cats and turtles. They draw a lot of scenes from the afterlife.

We each made a cartouche, which is a name tag with hieroglyphs. Hieroglyphs are pictures that Egyptians use for telling stories.

On Tuesday we each started making our sarcophagi; we made them out of water bottles, newspapers and paper mache. We dipped newspaper in bowls of sticky goo to make the sarcophagus. It was so sticky, messy, itchy and FANTASTIC!

We have also started to make wall friezes–which are “stones” we will be drawing on. Friezes decorated the walls and ceilings of the kings palace and the inside walls of the royal tombs. We haven’t gotten very far with these, so there will be more pictures to come.

Below are pictures of our week so far. There will be more information next week!

~K-1 students

Student drawing to scale.

Written by Konnar

We measured the perimeter of our playground and put it on grid paper to scale.  By doing this we need to find out where to put our new gardens.

Students working together on their measurements.

We went outside with our measuring tools and measured all five sides of our playground. It is very slopped and big.

Students used meter sticks to measure and then converted to yards.

This student used a sick in the ground to see where she left off of. Students exploring with different organizational skills.

Our results…

Our Children’s School collaborated with a Stephens organization called Women of the Earth (a new organization on campus this year). Students from our school donated recyclable materials to the group in order for them to create a tree made completely of recyclable materials. While our students donated, we also collected materials-with these materials, we made ornaments. These ornaments were hung today on the tree.

Students gathered around in celebration while others hung their ornaments.

A student explaining the design on her ornament to others.

After presenting our ornaments, our school sang three songs.  Two they composed this year with Music Teacher Ms. Violet and the third was a favorite of Ms. Violet.

Students singing.

After our program, Women of the Earth presented us with a tree to plant and a frame for the photo below! We had a wonderful celebration together. We look forward to planting seeds with them May 3rd.

We want to tell you about murals because we’re learning about them in social studies for the next few weeks.

Murals are big paintings on the walls, floors or ceiling. Here are some interesting facts you may want to know about cave paintings:

• Cave paintings are the first murals to be found on Earth.
• They come from 30,000 B.C.
  
• Cavemen drew paintings to communicate and tell stories.
• They were able to see in the caves by lighting animal fat and sticks on fire.
• Cavemen drew pictures of weapons that were used for hunting.
• Cows, horses, buffalo, sheep and bulls were drawn on the walls.
• They also drew pictures of people hunting these animals.
• The blew paint over their hands on the cave walls.
  
• They used horse hair brushes to pain on the caves.
• Their paint was made out of dust, berries, animal fat, charred sticks, rocks and flowers.

Stay tuned for more information about murals…but now we have to learn it!

Written by Kindergarten-First grade students

Below are some pictures to show you what we’ve learned about cave paintings. They include us painting on rocks, painting scenes like cavemen would on “cave walls” and our Know/Wonder/Learn chart.

Welcome to SCCS blog!  In the older student science group, we are studying nature.  Our unit is called Plantia.  We are going to put in a rain and butterfly garden on our playground.

On our first day we read the book Our Tree Named Steve.  Then we charted what Steve did for his family.

On our own we had to write what we think trees do for us.

Then we read a book called Be a Friend To Trees.  We made posters about being a friend to trees.  Those are hung around our building.

We made a venn diagram explaining what comes from a tree, what doesn’t come from a tree and objects that come from a tree and not a tree.

We researched what a rain and butterfly garden were and then made a definition out of that information.

We also split into groups and formed questions.

During literacy we’ve been looking at expostotory writing.  This will help us be able to write grants to earn money for our playground and writing posts for this blog!

 Come by anytime to see our work!

Written By: Nora and Lillian

Thursday, April 18th we have guest speakers coming into the classroom to show the children about how a 3-D printer works. We will have more information tomorrow, but tonight would be a good opportunity to look online for videos and develop questions to ask tomorrow.

++UPDATE++

Our speaker has been rescheduled for the following Thursday due to weather.

Outside, finding a place for our Rain Garden.

Plantia is what we, the Second thru Fourth graders are calling our afternoon Social Studies unit. Soon we will measure the playground to prepare for a Rain and Butterfly Garden. We will be writing Grants for money to help make our different gardens. We hope that these gardens will be a big help to our playground.

We wanted a very unique name so we came up with a whole lot of creative names for our study.  Then we did a vote, the last two names were The Nature of Our Playground and Plantia.  We did a blind vote and the results were:

Plantia: 6

The Nature of Our Playground: 5

The name of our study is Plantia.

More to come at end of week about our study!

Written by two Fourth Grade students