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Tag Archives: Candy Project
Otter Class: I Could Write All Night
Wow! So much to tell you! Thanks for your patience!
Gratitude
I hope you all had a terrific spring break. While we were away from school, I was given the gift of attending the National Science Teachers Association 2017 conference. During the three days, I enjoyed 22 sessions, focusing on diversity, pedagogy, curriculum development, how to deepen student-to-student conversation and argumentation (not arguing!), agriculture, collaboration, physics, space science, and more.
Your support of Quest Academy helped me acquire this important professional development, and I’m excited about the things I’m already using to enhance your children’s education. Thank you!
Parent-Teacher Conferences
It was a real pleasure to meet with most of you during conferences. Hearing that your children are enjoying school was gratifying. Even better, I enjoyed the chance to converse about your amazing children, their ways of seeing the world, their methods for exploring it and trying to make sense of it. Furthermore, I learned a great deal from you during our conversations — thank you. Being on this journey with you is a true gift and I invite you again to contact me if you have any questions that we didn’t cover. I might or might not have an answer but certainly, through our connection, we will find a promising path forward.
During conferences, a number of families mentioned that they had been having difficulty accessing the Protected Image Page. I’ve just uploaded some fresh images and will email you shortly with the access information you need. Enjoy!
I also enjoyed delving more deeply with you into items from your children’s progress reports — thank you for bringing in your questions. If you haven’t yet, you might want to check out the rating scale descriptors, to ensure that you’re clear on what the numbers really mean.
Special Days
Thanks again for the excellent snacks! Thanks to everyone for your care in reading labels and helping ensure the health and safety of every student. Thanks also to families who brought foods that we returned to you, for your patience. We recognize that following the nut-free policy is not part of your normal shopping routine, so please continue to not take it personally if we have to send something back!
To get the most recent Snack Safely peanut-free foods list, please click here. It’s updated every two weeks. If you need a refresher on the nut free zone policy, it’s here.
We’ve had some amazing Special Day presentations. Here’s a sampling of the great things we’ve enjoyed and learned from each other:
- a science experiment/art exploration using milk and food coloring — fat is amazing!
- how to use a calendar to track time and special events
- sea creatures from Florida and the protective “homes” they create and leave behind when they die
- the human body – bones, muscles, and digestive system
- a couple of students have presented their pages in the Otter Class Family Book
- how to play the trumpet
- a virtual trip to the Shedd Aquarium
- the powers of the Greek glass eye
- an amazing antique mechanical coin bank and how it works
- a visit with princesses
The growth we’ve seen in the children’s ability to speak clearly and purposefully about a topic is wonderful. Thanks for your support of My Special Day – it continues to be an important part of our learning.
Holi
Do you recall that week in mid-March when we enjoyed that sudden snowstorm? Well, it just so happened that it was the same week as the Holi celebrations in India. Holi celebrates the coming of spring as well as the triumph of good over evil. One of the most famous aspects is the brightly colored powder revelers throw on each other. Following a recipe found on the internet (!), the students whipped up a few colors of gulal in the classroom. Then we went outside and celebrated spring by throwing the powder on…the snow! More pictures are on the images page.
Invitation
If you haven’t yet enjoyed coming into class to share your vocation, avocation, culture, or anything else you might like to share with your child’s class, please get in touch with me ASAP. We have fewer than 40 days left of school and I want to get everyone in who’s interested and able to do so. We have such wonderful diversity in our families and there is so much to share — family history, culture, hobbies, professional pursuits, and more. Each and every parent has something to teach these children so if you can ever spare 20 minutes in the morning, we would like you to have a Special Day too!
Candy Project
We are making our way through the recipes. We’re having a lot of failures and they are so delicious. We’ve enjoyed reading, math, science, and much more through this work. I’ve been most impressed with the focus groups. Students have begun to comment separately on texture, flavor and appearance. They have thoughtfully and gently critiqued their work, and many have declared it important to try again.
In the coming week, students will develop their packaging. We’ll start by observing packages we have on hand as well as logos and product art in books. If you have any candy packages around the house, please send them in for our study.
I expect we’ll all learn a bit about color theory, solid geometry, writing, language, and how images and words can lead us to have certain ideas and feelings.
Art Class
I know Mrs. Sala has her own blog, but I was so excited by our internal field trip, I just had to tell you about it. Recently the students began working in clay, specifically learning the “pinch pot” build technique. This week, Mrs. Sala led us on a sort of treasure hunt to find the kiln.
Students were fascinated by the machine and had numerous questions about how it is used and how it works. Check out more pictures here.
Other Goings-On
We could give it lots of other names, but there’s always some math happening around here…
…and emergent writing…
…this one needed to be mailed. Thanks for the stamp, Mrs. Perry!
Some students helped build a new apparatus for the sensory table.
Outdoors, we tested new physics ideas: gravity, balance…
…and acoustics…yes, we’re singin’ in the rain! (well, laughing, actually).
Well, I could write all night, but I think I’d better call it a day! See you soon!
Otter Class: Sweet! Candy Science Update
A few posts ago, I described the way the Candy Project came about and I outlined how I thought it would probably go. So far, it is going that way! All of the students did engage in book research and have notes in their journals showing their discoveries.
In that post, I also mentioned we’d have a virtual interview with a candy scientist. Well, I’m ecstatic to tell you that Jason Dews and Maria Anderson from the Ferrara Pan Candy Company in Bellwood, Illinois actually came to our classroom!
Mr. Dews is on the engineering side of candy and Mrs. Anderson is on the chemistry side. Students first learned that “all candy starts with an idea.” Sometimes the idea comes from the bosses, sometimes from the scientists, and sometimes from consumers. Mr. Dews and Mrs. Anderson explained how the idea goes through a cycle of development, including design, prototyping, focus group data collection, refinement, and back to design. Mrs. Anderson taught us about the common ingredients in candy. She also brought a refractometer and taught our students how to use it to literally see how much sugar is in a given solution.
Students learned that designers’ first attempts at making a new candy sometimes don’t work and scientists often have to make many versions of a new idea before they find the one that has the preferred appearance, flavor, texture, and hardness. Mr. Dews explained how some of the machinery works to make and package the candy.
After the lesson, a few students showed Mr. Dews their candy designs and he offered encouragement and coaching. Meanwhile, we all prepared to engage in a focus group to test a candy innovation that involved dipping gummy worms into three different kinds of dip.
Students learned that food coloring that’s designed to stain your tongue is called a “dye” color, and one that’s designed to leave your tongue its own color is called a “lake” color. We were very grateful for the time and expertise Mr. Dews and Mrs, Anderson gave us (not to mention the gummy worms!). After we said thank you and goodbye to our subject matter expert visitors, the students sat down to write thank you notes.
This week, they visited another subject matter expert, Mrs. Perry, to learn how to mail those notes to Mr. Dews and Mrs. Anderson. Mrs. Perry fielded questions about the postage machine and how the mail would actually get to the people to whom we sent it.
This week, students have began making their candy inventions. In preparing for this, I was unable to find candy molds for a “house” shape and “Ta’kaa” (from Moana), so we learned that we can make our own molds of any shape we wish by adapting sand casting. Sand cast molds are made by pressing the desired shape into damp sand, removing that shape, and then pouring the material into the sand mold. This week, students have been making crayons using this technique — children casted crayons in the shape of toy cars, toy ice cream, and various geomentric shapes from our manipulatives bins.
But, you say, we can’t eat sand or crayons, so what does that have to do with candy?! Well, this technique is supposed to work by substituting confectioner’s sugar for sand, and candy solution for wax! As of this writing we’ve tried it twice, with different results.
We’ve been following the process we learned from Mrs. Anderson and Mr. Dews. Students did research, created their designs, looked at established recipes, modified them for their own innovation, and made a batch of candy.
During the making phase, students are writing or dictating the amounts of ingredients and the procedure — that way, when we taste the candy, we’ll know what we did to make it.
The following day, we’re running focus groups to gather opinion data on the prototype. The first innovation was supposed to come out hard, but it came out “slimy” and “gooey;” still, it tasted “great!” (Who can complain about a failure that tastes good?) Students used this failure as a learning experience: the second innovation we tried was supposed to be slimy, so we did essentially the same thing.
We still have many innovations to try to create. In the days ahead, and when we return from break, we’ll continue to create test batches, run focus groups, and create packaging.
Check out the photographs to the Protected Images Page!
Housekeeping
Thank you very much for making our transition to a peanut-free zone so smooth on our end. I hope it has been smooth on your end as well.
Goldfish crackers are the most easily accessible snack on the list and we’re now well-stocked with those. If you’re able to pick up something else for For your child’s next special day, if you’re able to conveniently pick up something else, that would help give students some variety.
Curriculum Update
Candy project
Typically, January in the Otter class involves an in-depth study of animals, springing from Mr. Scott’s visit. Although your children loved interacting with his exotic animals, they were not inspired to undertake an investigation. So, we conducted an interest survey. The topic that received the strongest response was “candy.”
As a teacher who takes health seriously, this was a challenge for me. Candy? Seriously? But then I turned back to the central guidelines of choosing a topic for a project:
- it must be interesting to the students
- it helps if it is interesting to the teachers
- it must provide opportunities for in-depth study, as well as for learning in a variety of domains (literacy, math, science, fine motor, gross motor, visual art, music, STEAM, etc.)
- it helps if the topic can lend itself to out-of-the-school-building experiences
It was clear that #1 was covered, and #2 was looking fine too. But I wondered if candy could really lend itself to a multi-disciplinary study or if we could find anything “candy-ish” to do outside of the school building.
I was excited to discover that it does. As I began to imagine where the students might take this, and where it might take them, a host of opportunities presented themselves. Students have already begun to engage in book-based research. Some students learned a little bit about how lollipops are made, where chocolate comes from, what a candy factory looks like, and more. This involved learning more about non-fiction books, how to find information in them, and how to “take notes.”
These initial forays will lead to new research questions that will be explored through books, a local field-site visit, and at least one Skype interview with an expert in the industry. I’ll share more about both of those as soon as their arrangements are more complete.
These projects tend to go where the students take them. At this point, I expect that in the coming weeks students will:
- invent their own type of candy, including the elements of appearance, flavor and texture
- create a name for that candy
- create packaging for it
- actually make the candy (or at the very least, attempt to!)
- create an advertisement for the candy, including the student’s choice of a jingle, a “TV” ad, a print ad, a combination of these, or another form of the student’s creation
These adventures will involve authentic, multi-disciplinary work involving book research, connecting with experts in the field, brainstorming, math, science, health and nutrition, literacy, visual art, communication, technology, and more.
Students brainstormed elements of “appearance,” an important facet of a piece of candy. They ended up thinking heavily about “shapes,” and so we have here circle, diamond, square, rectangle, monster, Takaa’s darkness, and mountain.
If you or your child has any questions about this project, please let me know. Other parents and/or other children may wonder the same thing, and we can all learn together.