Thursday, October 25, 2012

Celebrating Autumn at Upattinas School

Autumn has come to our school!

The leaves have fallen. They cover the ground with warm reds, yellows, oranges, purples, and browns. We (the Lower School) rake them into enormous piles and jump into them from the branches of the Monkey Tree.

In class, we drew, painted, and traced the symmetrical leaves for 2D and 3D artwork. In Language Arts, we read Robert Frost's poem October together and wrote poems about this colorful and amazing season.

We love autumn and don't want it to leave!

Click here to see more pictures!!

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Play dough

Written by the Lower School...

The Upattinas Lower Schoolers made play dough. We worked long and hard, for hours, through blood, sweat, and tears to make this play dough. Just kidding! The recipe only took 10 minutes and it was fun and simple. One of the things that we learned was to not use too much food coloring, since it changes the consistency of the play dough, and it dyes your hands. The dough will last for 2 weeks in the refrigerator. We recommend you try this recipe too! It makes a great gift.

Recipe:

4 cups of flour
1 cup of salt
1½ cups of water
6 tablespoons of oil
Food coloring

Combine and knead well.

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In science we experimented with the ingredients of play dough and found out that:

  • Salt makes the dough sticky
  • Water makes the dough even stickier
  • Flour makes the dough less sticky

We also found out that water is very dense and makes the play dough very heavy. And we found out that there is water in almost everything! Did you know that play dough is an amorphous solid? That is a solid that is changeable.

Click the pictures to enlarge!