Mystery Reader and All About Eyes
On the last day of January, we had mystery readers in Flowers! Can you guess who visited? We also looked at EYES. There were different shaped eyes and we tried to match each eye with an animal. Which design do we have? Why do butterflies have compound eyes but we have camera eyes?
In the morning circle, we sang our morning song and counted the number of friends in so many different languages: English, Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew and Tagalog! Many friends were so eager to count and suggested some inventive languages. We always have such great confident faces :)
Nanako placed something on a piece of white paper and asked, “What do you think this is?” K answered, “This one like...I know in Japanese...same (shark)...I know eye!” K added and said, “I think this is a midori (green)penguin.” Yes, today we were going to talk about EYES and we started off playing a matching game but this was very difficult because there were 20 animals– garden snail, bullfrog, brownsnout spookfish, halibut, nautilus, leopard gecko, Atlantic bay scallop, colossal squid, blue mountain swallowtail, green pit viper, jumping spider, tuatara, panther chameleon, ghost crab, gharial, housecat, hippopotamus, tarsier, mantis shrimp and Eurasian buzzard! A lot of friends were very observant and looked very carefully at the picture of the animal and tried to match with the similar looking eye. Did you know that there are FOUR basic eye designs?
We tried to guess which kind we have. L, E and A guessed that we have pinhole eyes, K and R guessed, compound eyes and J, camera eyes. Hmm...In the book EYE to EYE by Steve Jenkins, it explains that a starfish or a garden snail has the simplest eye design called the eyespot which can only detect light. A giant clam or a nautilus has pinhole eyes which can form images like we do but the images are dimmer. A dragonfly or a butterfly has compound eyes composed with hundreds and thousands of lens in each eye. All birds, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals have camera eyes. So answering our previous question; we humans have camera eyes! A blue mountain swallowtail butterfly for example can see all the colors we see plus ultraviolet light that we cannot detect with our eyes. Moreover, even among camera eyes, the brownsnout spookfish’s eye is split in two parts and allows to look above and below the surface of the water at the same time or the Eurasian buzzard can hunt down a mouse three kilometers away! We remembered that yesterday we looked at some insects with Kai and tried to make hypothesis about why they look the certain way they do. Today, we discussed why a butterfly has compound eyes…
K: They are small and they can fly. Sometimes butterfly has one eyes or zero eyes.
A: The butterfly if they only have a little lens then they can only see little stuff.
E: They don’t want to be caught by people.
Nanako: Who else likes to catch a butterfly?
K: My friend.
E: Chameleon.
W: Maybe a owl.
S: Spiders eat butterfly.
B: (Pointing at a picture of the Eurasian buzzard) Why does the eye ball does not give you a picture in your brain? When people go to the clam eye, the clam shuts.
E: Butterflies eat flowers.
Nanako: What colors do you see?
E: Rainbow.
K: Yellow.
J: Light blue.
R: Butterflies have a long tongue to reach the honey.
Nanako: Why do butterflies have compound eyes?
B: Dragon fly, when you come towards them they use there back things to sting.
Our thoughts can go through many different paths and we come up with new ideas and questions along the way...eventually, we reach to an answer(s)! For today, we learned that there are many flowers that attract butterflies with stripes and patterns only visible in ultraviolet light and that is one reason why they have compound eyes.
In the middle of our eye discussion, we welcomed our mystery readers for today...T who is W’s friend in Australia came to visit us with his mom and his dad! They even showed us where they live on our big map then W showed us where he comes from. We were very lucky to hear two books - J read The Alphabet Book and G read Tillie and the Wall, both written by Leo Lionni. The first story was about the alphabets who lived on a tree learning to make words and then sentences, just like we are learning to write. The second book was about a mouse Tillie who was curious to find out what was on the other side of a big wall. He tries to climb and break the wall and when he finally dug a tunnel under the wall, he finds that the world on the other side was not much different to where he came from and the mice all have a party! We love surprises! Thank you T, J and G for sharing two fabulous books!
We also read another book after park time, My Grandfather’s Coat by Jim Aylesworth and Barbara McClintock. It was a great book telling the story about how one coat was not made into one waste because when his coat wore out, he made himself a jacket, then a vest, tie, kitten’s toy and when the toy wore out, a family of mice made it into a nest until all was gone...This week, we started talking a little bit more about what REDUCE means and we finished the week, thinking about how we can REDUCE.
Thank you for another lovely day!
Love from the Flowers children xoxo