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Showing posts from October, 2015

Halloween 2015

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Every Halloween at Imagine we pick one of our friends designs to be the face of our classroom jack-o-lantern. This year we started the week prior to Halloween tracing pumpkins and jack-o-lanterns on our light table. We followed the work we did on the light table with a suggestion to the children that they design their very own jack-o-lantern. All the faces were great!  Some were happy and some were scary. When everyone had a chance to make a design we began the voting process, narrowing it down to just five finalists. We had a class discussion about what it means to "vote" .  With the design in hand we set out to prepare our pumpkin for carving. We like to give the children a chance to be somewhat involved in this process. We achieve this by placing dots around the lines drawn on the pumpkin and allowing those interested to pound golf tees into the pumpkin. It's a great way for them to be involved  without a knife. This is

Ghosts

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Today we made some awesome ghost puppets. We used white tool, pillow stuffing, raffia, construction paper, glue and a stick from our playground. There were a lot of ghostly noises  in our classroom today!

Fall Leaves

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Our class has been talking about Autumn. The change of seasons is more subtle for us in north central Florida but it is still a noticeable change. We have had a few class discussions about the leaves falling and the weather cooling down. After reading a few books about leaves we decided to make our own representational leaf art. We collected leaves from the playground and each child chose a leaf they thought was special to draw. The Children traced the leaves with pencil and then went over their lines with a black marker.  Some children noticed the lines running through the leaves. Enid told us "thats how the trees get food and water."  Next we mixed colors to match the fall leaves and painted ours to match. They came out really beautiful. 

My Friends Name

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We revisited the subject of names by setting up an invitation to spell your friends name. We laminated photos of all our friends with their name printed on each picture. We set out letters with the intention that a  child might pick their friends picture from the basket and then match the letter squares to the letters in their name. We also provided the materials if a child wanted to write their friends name.

Making apple pie

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Today we made an apple pie! With all our talk about Autumn we thought warm apple pie would be delicious on a blustery day. And what a great time to talk about our sense of taste, The children had the opportunity to cut the apples. They added the brown sugar and spices. They spooned the apples into the pie crust and into the oven it went. Tomorrow we will have it for snack. What a yummy Fall treat!

Playground sounds

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We have been talking about our five senses in the preschool. On this beautiful day we spent time discovering different sounds on our playground. We recorded the sound of our feet crunching through the dried leaves and made drumming sounds on our slide.  We recorded the squeaky sound the gate makes and the loud sound a metal bucket makes when dragged across cement. We even recorded the sound of water in our hand washing sink. At snack time we read a book about our sense of hearing. We listened to the sounds we recorded on our playground and tried to guess what each sound was.  We talked about sounds that make us happy and sounds we don't like.

Painting Apples

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This provocation invited the children to paint apples.  We talked about shape, color and which of our senses we were using. We revisited concepts like same and different, counting and color mixing. With every painting activity we do we are seeing our friends confidence grow. It was great to see our younger friends jump right into this activity. 

Smells so good

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We explored our sense of smell today. We set up a provocation consisting of mortar and pestles, mint, Rosemary, cloves and cinnamon sticks. The children crushed the herbs and spices with the mortar and pestles releasing the most amazing smells.

Spirals

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We read this great book called " Swirl by Swirl" spirals in nature by Joyce Sidman. With all of our talk of  dots, lines and shapes we thought the spiral was a cool new idea to explore. We were really amazed at how many spirals occur naturally in "nature" .  We set up an invitation for the children to explore and create spirals. Clay was our first medium . Through the use of clay the children discovered that a spiral is a line. The children had to first make a line with their clay. A friend told us, " you just gotta roll it up!  Quinn told us " spirals turn into lines when they get uncurled!" We put all of our spirals together to make one beautiful piece of art. Our friends also realized that they could create spirals in other ways. With pencils and crayons, and chenille sticks on the light table...