Blog Archives

Coat, Hat, Pants & Shoes.....

9/30/2020

From animal fur to flower petals, we can find artistic patterns hidden throughout nature. Nature often inspires artists to paint or make fabric in unique ways. We discussed when we wear a coat and how it keeps us warm and we talked about coats that animals wear. This Invitation to Create invited children to plan how to use patterns in their own expressive art. When there are no steps or directions to follow, children are able to take creative risks. I provided the children with markers, stickers, paper, cotton balls and glue. The cotton balls came out when one child mentioned he wanted to make wool!
We read the book Polk-A-Dot pants and created our own polka dot pants. We used clothes pins and pom pom's to create dots. They used fine motor skills to pinch the clothespins and paint with the pom poms.
We have also been reading the book Beatriz, Bananas and the Very Big Hat. We learned about different types of hats and that "hat" starts with the letter H. Hats can also help protect our heads. The children created a crown by weaving the band through the slits on the triangles. This required some hard work and patience, but they were able to do it!
We used story telling pieces to retell the the story of Beatriz and the Bananas. I asked questions such as what happened when Beatriz fell asleep? Did she trick the monkeys to get her hats back? They worked with their friends to retell the story.

We learned that shoes and socks come in pairs. We created a shoe and practiced lacing.
We worked on the letter Hh this week. We celebrated another birthday!

Shirt.....

9/23/2020

Self-help skills builds a child's confidence. Teaching your child to be independent is an important confidence builder. Learning to dress themselves will help them learn to be more independent. When children accomplish tasks such as putting on their own shoes they are excited! How many times have you heard your child say, "I did it!" They are proud and excited to have accomplished something on their own!
Today we talked about clothing. Shirts can have buttons, snaps, pockets, or collars. We can fold shirts into different shapes. Some shirts have long sleeves and some have short sleeves.
Today we designed a shirt and sewed on buttons.
One kiddo wrote the words that he had on his own shirt. "whee, whee!"
We laced buttons and also sorted by color.

Touch and Smell.....

9/21/2020

Touch! We use our hands to touch and feel things. There are many different types of textures, such as rough, smooth, bumpy, soft and hard. Some things we touch are different temperatures.
We used sand to create a rough texture for our art. Some used a spoon to transfer the sand others pinched with their fingers and some poured the sand!
We read Ten Red Apples and then played a counting game with felt circles, our pretend apples. Each child took a turn to roll a dice, identified the amount and removed the same number of felt circles and we said, "the sheep at 4 red apples." Each child chose what ate the apples!
We use our noses to smell. There are strong, mild, sweet or stinky smells. We like certain smells and dislike others. We smelled spices and vinegar. Some of the kids like the smell of vinegar!
We discussed how some flower smell good and then I provided the kids with paper cup, scented markers, scissors glue and paper. They created their own flowers!

Sound & Taste.....

9/15/2020

Sound! We hear with our ears. Different materials create different sounds. The sounds we hear can be loud or soft. We can listen to the sounds instruments make. We listened to a drum and the different sounds. We discussed what instruments have strings.
Today we created a bowl instrument and pretended we were in a marching band. We made an instrument by wrapping rubber bands around a bowl.

Taste! We taste with our mouths. Some tastes are sour, salty, sweet or bitter. We can make healthy or unhealthy food choices. I asked the question how do you think foods change when we cook them? I explained pasta is hard before it is cooked and after it is cooked, it is soft! We made noodle bracelets using pipe cleaner, noodles and markers to color if they wanted.

We also celebrated Orion's 4th birthday!

Sight.....

9/14/2020

We see with our eyes. Our eyes are different colors. We made a graph with our eye colors today. Eyes can move up, down, and side-to-side. We use our eyes for looking, spying and watching. We looked for hidden pictures today. They selected a card and hunt for the matching picture or letter.
Today we made art inspired by Piet Mondrian. We looked at a work of art from Piet Mondrian. His art is full of shapes and specific colors. We discussed the shapes and colors that were used.
We also read the book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?

X-Ray.....

9/8/2020

How do your bones feel under your skin? An x-ray is photo of hard things inside soft things. Our body has hard bones covered with soft skin. The kiddos viewed the x-ray photos and we used chalk and crayons to create various effects and expand their understanding of bones. The children were invited to create their own X-ray using a pre cut skeleton.
Arms move in different ways. We can shrug our shoulders, bend our elbows and ties our wrists. Oour arms have bones that can break. We use arms to carry pull and pick up things. We can also use them to hug!
We used play dough and tangrams to build designs. This was a fun independent play that created a lot of discussion! The kids built people, bridges, dinosaurs and robots.
We created our own x-ray's. We painted hands white, placed hand prints on white paper, scraped black paint across the paper and the hand prints magically appeared!
We also worked on patterns with buttons.

Brains....

9/4/2020

We talked about our heads this week, so of course we discussed the skull and brains. We used spaghetti noodles for the brain and the hard-plastic bowls represented the skull.

All About Me....

9/1/2020

This month is All About Me! We made self portraits. The children were shown an example of a self portrait, we discussed all the details. Then they tried to draw all of their features, including a nose, eyes, ears and mouth.
The kids were given a paper bag, assorted colors of paper, markers, glue, scissors, sticker eyes and were encouraged to create a family puppet. Some chose to make themselves others chose their parents!