Does Technology Improve Our Lives?

Happy Wednesday! It’s a nice sunny day outside and we’ve been having a great day!

This morning we finished up a few final preparations for tomorrow’s Dad’s Day celebration. We are all very excited to share a fun morning with them in Flowers class! We can’t wait!

After our morning free play and snack time, we had Maryna come to our class for some dancing! We danced to some of our favorites, including I’m Gonna Catch You. We played some new games as well, like putting a bean bag in between our feet and lifting it up, and passing the bean bag around the circle until the music stops. As always, we had a lot of fun with Maryna!

After that, we enjoyed some nice time at the park. These days, when we go to the park, it is windy and cold, but today’s weather was quite nice! We had fun playing on the slides and running around with our teachers and classmates, including those from Petals class.

CIRCLE TIME

Recently, we have been learning about different kinds of technology, and how it helps us in our daily lives. Yesterday, we learned how improvements from said technologies allow us to have more time to accomplish things we otherwise wouldn’t be able to.

QUESTION OF THE DAY ( Does technology help you? )

Today’s question left many of us wondering…

Hi: What’s technology??

Ai: It’s science and like building things, like houses. Improving people’s lives.

We learned that technology includes things that can help improve our lives or make things easier. After hearing that, Ky said, “oh, I see!” It turned out that the meaning of that big word “technology”, was actually something that we already knew. We could name a lot of those kinds of things…

Ai: Cars, telephone, computers.
Ky: Washing machine.
Co: Sink, washing machine, dish washer.
Re: Ice cream and washing machine.

We could make an even longer list if we tried, but first let’s talk about how these things help us. Many of us said that a clothes washing machine is something that helps us a lot. How?

Ai: instead of washing clothes in a river, we can use the washing machine.

Ka: Yes, you only need to put special soap. In my house, there are 3 rectangles, you put pink and sometimes green and blue special soap.

Ky: It’s too easy, washing machine. You can open, then throw away the shirt and press the button and finish! You close the door and it’s not gonna be hard.

Ka: My mommy put (clothes) in other bag. You cannot put just t-shirt. My mommy do bag inside, when she is done, she put in basket, t-shirt.

Co: Washing machine, put the soap and push the button and it go round and round and stop once and it goes round and round again. It dries inside. I have two machine, one is for washing and one for drying. It fold and it go in the box. It’s gonna be all done. When my mommy and daddy come back to work she say, “oh my gosh, it’s all done, there’s nothing inside, what is happening?” Every day she says that, it’s funny!

We were all amazed by Co’s washing machine! We knew that there are washing machines and even dryers that make it so you don’t need to hang the laundry outside to dry. But we didn’t know about the dryer that also folds the clothes too! We couldn’t believe it! We thought that sounded really cool! Our teachers found a picture of one online and asked Co if that looked like hers, and she said “yes, we bring it from America to Tokyo.”

Re: My washing machine is press button inside. Washing machine wash and wash and wash. Then washing machine say, “I’m finished!”
Sh: My washing machine is not talking!

We were happy to share about our unique washing machines! It seems like washing machines are getting better and better, helping us out in even more ways than before. We wondered what might happen next.

We learned that sometimes when something new is created, that solves a problem, we call that an invention. There have been many inventions in the history of the world. We looked at a few of them.

First, we compared two items and decided which one was invented first.

-A traditional telephone or a smartphone? We all said the traditional phone.
-A bicycle or a car? We said bicycle.
-A computer or a typewriter? We were sure it was the typewriter.
-An airplane or a pen? We all said pen.

We made correct guesses on each comparison. Then we needed to line them all up in order, from oldest invention to most recent invention. We did a pretty good job of deciding where to place each item on the timeline. There were only a few that we needed to rearrange.

We could see where we were on the timeline, because we have all of the inventions available to us today, but people born 100 years ago, didn’t have access to some of them, like smartphones and personal computers. We wondered what inventions would be created in the future…

Ky: Robot!
Ka: I don’t like robots because I’m scared!
Co: They not eat us, they just say something to us.
Re: Niko chan robot is in restaurant.
Co: There is a robot near Hiroo Park.
Ka: Some robot deliver mail. People don’t need to go.
Sh: Last time I see a robot with green eyes and give people tea and coffee.

We already see robots sometimes now! Maybe in the future they’ll be able to do even more things.

What other inventions would we like to see?

Ai: Maybe something like travel? How do you say it...like time travel, maybe? Like if we wanted to go to Boston really fast and come back!

Ka: America now nighttime. Here is sun, because come people know that the sun goes to the left then they go where somebody sleeping. They will like sleeping time for America.

At this point in our discussion, it was way past the time that we usually eat lunch, so we were hungry. We thought how awesome it would be if we could all travel to Boston really fast to eat lunch and then come back to Ohana in time for our after school classes. We hope in the future there will be an invention that allows us to do that! For now, we’ll have to settle for eating our lunch together in class, as usual. But we love that too!

We hope you all have a wonderful evening! We will see you all and your dads tomorrow morning for Dad’s Day!

Love,
Flowers XOXO