From Sea to Shining Sea

Today we read “When I Came to This Land” to introduce how people came to America. We talked about Ellis Island and how long and difficult the journey was for people who embarked on it.  We brainstormed how they must have felt on their journey and how hard people worked to build a new life for their family. We studied the meaning of the word fortunate and wrote why we are fortunate in Writer’s Workshop.

    Next, we carefully studied the Statue of Liberty. To fully understand how large the statue is the kids looked at the measurements of certain parts of the statue like her eyes, nose and hands. We then measured our eyes, nose, a fingernail, a finger with a partner and recorded our own measurements. We were amazed at how truly ginormous the Statue of Liberty is in comparison to all of us! Our eyes were all a little over an inch wide whereas Lady Liberty’s eyes are two feet six inches across!!! We did some mental subtraction and scaffolded with white board subtraction where necessary. We then created life size cut outs of Lady Liberty’s nose, fingernail, and eye. It turns out most of us are shorter than her nose. To wrap up the lesson and to double check that we knew how to use the requested measurement on the ruler independently (inches for this study) they each had to cut a six inch eyelash to add to our two and a half foot eye!  The eyelash was their ticket to help hang up the large creations. We made sure we were implicitly clear that the real statue of liberty does not have eyelashes and nor is she made out of paper.

    To tap into the science side of the project we discovered that the statue of liberty is made out of copper and is only as thick as two pennies put together!!! We learned that she looks green from oxidation over time due to nature’s elements. We compared seven pennies with “birth dates” spanning thirty three years and examined their color. We noted the same effect on older pennies that we saw on the Statue of Liberty; a slightly green color! We learned that this greenish color is actually a film called patina. We tapped into our senses and felt the difference between a new copper colored penny and a penny that had the patina film on it. What a fun day!