The Super Cleaner Upper: our invention

For the summative project, the children created their own cleaning machine as inspired by The Cat in the Hat.  This cleaning machine sprays water from a hose, and has a pipe to suck up the water and dirt.  From there, the dirty water travels to the round tummy, goes through the special triangle and into the square tummy where the water is then cleaned, (so clean that even Matthew's dog Dakota could drink it!).  The clean water is then transported to the froggy cup on the top.  The children were very interested to know that Dyson, the world's leading vacuum cleaning company does not have a machine that can clean and recycle dirty water.   And Earth Group learned what the word "prototype" means !

The design

The children testing out their machine

The children discover that plugging the machine in won't make it work

Kesler having fun with the water hose

The children take turns

Shadow Play and Puppets

With Kathryn, the children had explored how technology like iPads, computers, and television affect their lives.  We continued this exploration by wondering what children did before there was television.  What would you do if there was no tv, no toys?  What do you when you play in the forest?   Here are some of their ideas:

Maybe they read a lot of books-Cameron

Maybe they sang songs a lot and had parties - Mila

Maybe they drew pictures and shared them back and forth -Paxton

You can play hide-and-seek or tag-Connor

Remember when we drew sand pictures?  Then maybe did that--Matthew

Even though there is little to no social interaction and creativity when it comes to watching television; I was glad to see that the children enjoy using their imagination is the way out of boredom.   

All of the children at Creative Minds watched the Cat in the Hat - a story about two very bored children the their pet fish, who run into a very silly cat, his two silly friends, Thing 1 and Thing 2,  who make "the mother of all messes" looking for a special machine.  At the end of the story, the machine and the Things 1 & 2 clean the whole house before the mother comes home.  We used these cutouts as shadow puppets to retell the story:

Characters of the "Cat in the Hat"

Ryleigh Cat Shadow

Connor playing the Cat

Paxton as Thing 2

Kesler as the Cat

Mila as Thing 1

Mila as the Cleaning Machine

Matthew as the Cat

 Quite naturally, the children then grew "bored" of the puppet play and decided to use their own bodies and imaginations for some shadow fun …

Mila and Paxton

Connor with claws

We have super powers !

Paxton is a frog

Add caption

Connor - I feel taller !

  

What did people use for money in the olden days?

In the beginning of this unit, Paxton asked the question "  What did people use for money on the olden days?  We watched a video called The Story of Money to find some answers.  In China in the olden days people valued shells and swapped them for currency.  In the beginning, it was quite common to trade perishable items, like food, but the problem was that food items can go rotten and lose its value.  In our first experiment, the children tried to figure out how many pieces of fruit and which fruits should be traded for a whole cow.   There was no consensus .  As we learned that people in the West started using non perishable items like gold nuggets, gold coins and precious metals, paper as "real money that we can see."  Although the children were aware of the concept of a credit card, they had no desire to play with this type of invisible currency, and so we excluded it from our chart. 

Earth Group Value Chart

Cameron thought that the shells "should be worth the most"

Children buying food, using their homemade baskets as shopping bags

Ryleigh with her shopping bag

Paxton, estimating how much his groceries cost- he said he didn't need any change

Ryleigh and Kesler shopping together