Erupting Eggs in Creative Arts! I was bored with the typical Easter Egg coloring methods....BORED! Is that a terrible admission? Teaching preschoolers is my passion. I have been at "my passion" for over 10 years and when holidays roll around and the "typical" crafts to go along with it, I am less than enthused (insert sigh...) If you are the parent of more than one little one, I am certain you can share my sentiment. I originally ran across this idea when looking into some letter "V" activities on several other blog sites. Here and Here When I ran across Dinosaur Eggs I KNEW I would have a major hit on my hands! These kiddos LOVE everything messy, everything fizzy, everything creative! Set up was easy, clean up was a breeze, but the place did smell like Easter for a few days because when you have 10 children coloring eggs it takes a TON of vinegar! THAT LOOK! This little guy is a HANDS ON learner!! I allowed the children to mix all their own ingredients. I simply provided the baking soda, vinegar, and food colors with appropriate clothing and let them create, mix, and observe the show! Here he has just dipped his paintbrush into the vinegar and baking soda, then colors and it watching it erupt at the end of his paintbrush. Sensory, Creative Arts, Science...all rolled into FUN!!! Fizzy fun that resulted in questions, observations, color mixing, and LOTS of colorful eggs. Perfect for pre-k!! I wish you well and I hope you get to play today! -L
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This pic was my favorite of the week and shows off our "G" is for ground learning unit perfectly! This week we talked about the ground. It's a natural choice for the children. They have watched the grass grow and fade, the rain fall and be soaked up, and now the snow fall and melt. We have planted seeds and watched them grow. We have harvested our SINGLE surviving vegetable plant...our oddly shaped cucumber that tasted a bit like the ground it came from! We have made mud and watched as the drought browned and scorched the flowers and plants. All of these events have brought lots of questions and now...the GROUND is cold, frozen and hard. So when we came upon the letter "G," once again, and we were discussing different things that started with the letter "G," we determined that the ground would be a fun topic of study. In this picture we have made a worm farm. We talked about the purpose of the worms in the ground. We learned that worms are decomposers and we made up a sweet little worm song. We read about worms and found out what they like to eat and how they move. During this week my little girl came down with the flu as well, sooo...we didn't get to finish all our wormy activities, but not to worry, Spring is right around the corner! A worm farm? Well...I'm glad you asked!The first part to any respectable worm farm is, of course, the dirt! And who wouldn't want to bring a bit of the outside INSIDE for some scientific sensory exploration?! We used what's called "organic soil." I found this quite humorous since...really...what soil isn't? BUT, I wanted the BEST for our worm friends and opted to purchase a bag of "organic" soil. We poured about half the bag into our biggest plastic bin (with a lid that had pre-drilled holes for air). For a while we just let the children experience the dirt. The younger ones dug right in. The older ones were curious and just wanted to move onto adding the WORMS! Soooo....we did just that... Twenty little earthworms...Since we were talking about the ground and earthworms, we kind of took a divergent path and got in depth about our wormy friends. We learned that eartworms are decomposers, that they help turn dead plants into dirt and help the ground to grow new living things. We also learned that earthworms only have a sense of feeling. That they move through the ground finding their way around with just how things FEEL to them. We praticed only using our sense of feel. In this lesson we closed our eyes to see if we could tell what was wet and what was dry. We discussed that we have "senses" and that we were NOT using our sense of sight, or smell, or hearing, but rather, our sense of FEEL. Each child took a turn, eyes closed, stating which cloth was dry or wet. We further observed that we could find our way across the table to the wet cloth just by feeling our way...just like a worm. Our wormy friends were a BIG hit. We measured their length with "non" conforming standards of measurement. We used paper, blocks, crackers (we didn't eat them!((the worms or crackers!!!)). We decided that the worms were different sizes around and different lengths. We looked at them through our magnifying glasses and we could see their rings. We also made up an earthworm song... (To the tune, I'm a Little Teapot) I'm a little earthworm soft and slow, through the earth I like to go. I'm a decomposer so you know, I'll eat the plants from down below! The Seeds Go Down, Into The Ground!First...click the title above to see the CUTEST little girls around sing this sweet little song about seeds growing in the ground! Ok...so we also did (and are still doing) ALOT of study about the ground. This includes seeds. How are the grown, what do they need, how fast will they sprout, can we water them again...why not???? Children LOVE dirt, this is such and EASY topic to hold their attention with. ANYTHING they can water and water and water is going to get LOTS of TLC (maybe a bit much). However, despite all the GREAT love our preschoolers have shown these beans they are GROWING. We closely examined the roots coming out of the beans. We noticed that the roots were indeed going "DOWN" into the soil and, as of the post...we didn't yet have any stems. We will continue to nurture our plants and update our progress. The holiday season is here and the children are excited for all things turkeys, trees and toys!!! The past couple of weeks we paused on the letter "B" as it made a perfect topic for this time of year to discuss "Blessings." During our lessons regarding Thanksgiving we learned that the holiday of Thanksgiving is a time to gather together with friends, family and other people at church, school, shelters and hospitals to give thanks to God for everything we have and to remember to say "Thank You!" to others that help us too. We discussed that a "blessing" is something good that we have, or love. We named, each day, many "blessings" to help the children understand that a "blessing" can be a toy, a home, a person, a pet, food, feeling healthy and strong and LOTS of other things. As we would go around the table each day naming "blessings" and we came up with some pretty cute ones!! One of my favorite blessings was learning that one of our little ones is going to be a big sister soon :))!! Congrats to you and your sweet family!!! Just a few of the things we are thankful for...
My Thanksgiving Book...During Thanksgiving week we focused on the history of Thanksgiving as we made this book. This was quite a project as we have a very young group, but it turned out SO CUTE!!! The story inside is one sentence on each page and what we learned about Thanksgiving. Page One is pictured to the left. Page Two says, "The Pilgrims sailed on a boat to discover a new land." We discussed that a pilgrim was a person that wanted to be able to say prayers to God in his own way and left his home to find a land where he could do that. Page Three says, "The boat was called the Mayflower." We learned that they sailed an a large boat and that it was the Mayflower. Page Four says, "They sailed to Plymouth Rock." We learned that they finally spotted dry land after months and months of seeing nothing but ocean and water. Page Five says, "They made friends they called Indians." We discussed that the people already living on the land knew how to grow food and hunt for food and that the Pilgrims were hungry and sick and that the Indians helped them to eat and be healthy in the new land. The final page says, "The Indians helped them plant lots of vegetables and they shared with each other on a day we call Thanksgiving." We learned that the Pilgrims and the Indians decided to have a great big meal together to say "Thank you God and Thank you friends," and that we do this each year too to remember that everything good we have comes from God. It's almost unimaginable that we have completed the alphabet once again! Its doesn't seem possible that we could be another 26 weeks down the road and almost to 2013! Each day is so full of that the days, weeks and months simply melt into one another and here we are nearing another Thanksgiving. Our letter Z week was full of zebras, zig zags and zany fun! We cut, colored, painted, played, glued, glittered, and sang our way through. Pictured here was just one of our Z activities. We used our blue painter's tape to further reinforce the "Z" shape and then we painted our black cardboard "Z's" white. Once dried, we peeled the tape to reveal the black underneath. This gave the "Z" a zebra stipe from beginning to end. Some of our lessons are planned... |
At the end of one of our days after discussing the type of footprints a zebra makes we decided to make some "prints" of our own. The children discovered that if they colored their hands with the chalk and crawled across the floor their "prints" would appear just like a zebra's in the dirt. They squealed, "Look, Ms. Donna!" "We made prints!" By the end of this fun little lesson we had prints through the kitchen, the hall, living room, playroom, walls, windows and doors. Thank goodness for Windex! | We got out the golf tees to practice making zig zags in the playdough. They LOVED these and you could here a pin drop as they were very concentrated on making patterns, poking, adding and subtracting the tees. We also sang Happy Birthday MANY times as we added counted how many candles each child had placed on the "cake" they made. This became an excellent impromptu math lesson and a FUN way to practice using the words "add," "subtact," and "equals." |
"There isn't anything more full of hope, joy and peace than a child's smile... It captures the mundane and makes it extraordinary." - LaDonna Woolsey
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A Little Bit Of This And That!
A View You Can Use!
A-Z Alphabet Theme
C Is For Cookie!
Continents And Countries
Curiosity
Curriculum
Dandelions And Darlings...
Happy Halloween!
Help For Tired Mommas...
Holidays
Letter M Monkey
Letter N Newts
Letter O Olympics
Letter P Is For People
Letter Q Is For Queen
Letter S
Letters Learning
Letter T
Letter U
Letter W
Letter X
Play Based Learning
Preschool
R Is For Rainbow
Sensory Play
Teaching And Learning
Turtles And Trains
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