056. Crushing Dreams

Hmph. I was planning to go to bed significantly earlier than my average. No such luck. Where do I begin? Eh, let's just do the media thing.

This is what happens when you place a pile of shaving cream on the table and add dashes of paint, briefly swirl it around, smash a piece of paper on the mixture, and scrape the cream off! The table is probably a lot cleaner this activity than it was prior. Well, both sessions did this and we/ I turned some pieces into this:

One of the nurses was out for personal reasons last week and they wanted to make a card for her when she came back! There were more pieces inside as well and it's actually a pretty hefty sized piece of work, lol. However, I had fun making it.

This here do-dad is exactly what it appears to be! A carrot top that has been submerged in nothing but water and sunshine filtered through a window. It has grow a bunch of white roots and the green sprouts on top just keep growing! I have no idea what it's planning to do and quite frankly, I don't think it knows either, but it's definitely doing a bunch of somethings! :D We're thinking about planting it in some dirt soon to see if that persuades it to grow more or maybe into a whole carrot again! Who knows?

Humor me and tilt your head/ screen to the side for now, whichever is easier. This is what I've spent most of my day working on, on and off. The kids are learning about Reducing, Reusing, and Recycling this week (yes, Earth Day was last week, it has been duly noted) and this included learning about endangered species. Keep in mind, these are pretty young kids so I didn't even consider adding plant species into this mix. It's still a work in progress, but I thought this was a nice start.

I found some websites with facts and pictures of a few endangered animals! It gave a brief biography about the animal and included snippets of its typical habitat and diet as well as its biggest threats. More and more species will be added as time/ years go on.

I feel like trying to explain the concept was pretty much crushing these kids' dreams. "Do you know what animal this is? Right, a tiger! You say you like tigers? Well, because people have been destroying its home and killing them to wear their fur or eat them, they are almost all gone forever!" ... It goes on with gorillas and cheetahs and black-footed ferrets and kiwi birds. I felt like such a butt telling them the facts, as if liking them and/or seeing them at the zoo (I understand the correlation between endangered animals being cared for in captivity) was leading up to the species' utter annihilation. Simplification failed. At least in my book, but some kids were started to grasp the concept of being careful so we don't hurt animals and that we need all the different kinds to help the environment!

This led to me wanting to make examples of different habitats so the kids could try to match the animals to their homes. I still need to make a cave-like picture before I'm satisfied. The next step that I'm going to work on is jumping onto my Cricut and cutting out items that will represent the harmful things that we're doing to these habitats that are destroying them and anything and everything that lives in them. Because you know we can't just halfway crush dreams. They must be crushed and obliterated like the Dodo birds. T_T. Sigh, lol.

Well, I'm pretty proud of those diagrams. I even made it all out of scrap pieces from class! Can you figure out what the habitats are? (Hint: Forest/ Woods, Mountain/ River/ Lake, Wetlands/ Marshland, Ocean/ Lake, Jungle/ Rainforest, Artic/ Antarctic/ Arid Desert, Grasslands/ Plains, and Desert/ Plateau. XD) I tried, I really did, lol.

Oye, I need to get to bed. It's a lot of hard work instilling young children with a sense of horror. Tomorrow is going to be quite the long day. Until then! <3