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Showing posts from November, 2015

Our Thankful Tree

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We set up an invitation for the class to paint branches. The next part of this project involved pom-poms, gems, feathers and glue. While we were decorating the branches we had great conversations about why we have a holiday called Thanksgiving. What does it mean to be thankful?  We asked the children what they were thankful for. We printed out their answers and  had them write their name on the back. We tied them with colored ribbon and the children hung them on our " Thankful tree" Happy Thanksgiving! 

Pumpkin Pie

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Today we made pumpkin pie!  We measured, poured and mixed. We baked them today and will eat them tomorrow for snack. 

Sprouting Acorns

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We decided to try to see if we can get acorns to sprout. We put them in sandwich bags with a wet paper towel. We hung them on the fence in a sunny spot.  We are checking on them everyday. Nothing yet but we are still hopeful.  Update: it worked! Some of the acorns sprouted!

Tree Drawings

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On this lovely Autumn day we brought clipboards, paper and pencils outside with the idea the children might like to draw trees. Everyone was pretty excited and waited patiently for their turn with the clipboard.  We had great conversation about the different parts of tree, the things that grow on trees and creatures that live in trees. 

Trees of Wire

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This project was done by the older children in our preschool class. Wire is a new medium for this group of children and even our elders needed a bit of help.  They practiced cutting the wire which can be a bit tricky. Manipulating the wire can also be a bit of challenge. This was great exercise for soon to be writing hands. We are still talking about trees in our class so those who took on this wire challenge made trees. I was happy to see that even after some frustration they were all able to create a tree that they were satisfied with. Their tree sculptures are pretty cool. 

Acorn paintings

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We have been reading a lot of books about trees. One of the things we already knew about trees is that not all trees are the same. There are different kinds of trees. On our playground we have many oak trees and with those oak trees come quite a large amount of acorns. They are always being collected by our small friends.  Our study of trees has brought us a great opportunity to explore more about these little round treasures. We brought a collection of them into our studio and decided to have a closer look. We noticed that they are brown but not all the same  "shade" of brown. We set out brown, white, yellow and some red paint and tried to make colors that matched our acorns. I think they did a pretty good job! After the colors were mixed we painted pictures of acorns. While talking about their shape we revisited the concept of "dots" and "circles". We hung them up next to our lovely forest in our work room.

Our Forest

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With all our interest in leaves, trees of course came up in conversation. As we do with many topics that come up, we asked the children, "what do you know about trees?" We discovered our friends knew a lot about trees. Cassius told us, "trees have roots", Kai let us know , "food grows on trees". We asked the class if they knew what the word "wonder" meant. Claudia quickly told us, " it means you don't know but you want to know".  We then asked the question, "what do you wonder about trees?" Quinn wanted to know, " how do trees grow?" Claudia asked, " why do trees have leaves?" So now we're on a mission. We are going to find out more about trees! On the first day of this art project we painted the ground and the sky on a large piece of butcher block paper. On the days following we used the edges of corrugated cardboard and brown paint to create the trunks and branches of the trees. With cork and foam