Imagine

We have been talking about the different kinds of water we can find in Florida. There are rivers and springs, lakes and streams which are all made up of fresh water. We have the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, and they are made up of salt water. We talked about the different kind of creatures that live in each type of water. For this provocation we invited the children to paint the sea. We used different "shades" of blue chalk and blue water color paint to create a water effect.  Cecelia told us, "my ocean is going to have a lot of waves."  Some children drew and painted "coral reefs" and told us stories about sharks and other creatures that live in the sea. 

Continuing our conversations and reading about Florida we introduced the word "habitat" and got to talking about what living things need to survive. We realized that some of the Florida animals we have been talking about live on land and some live in water. We read a few books about manatee and learned some really interesting things. Manatee live in water but they are mammals like us!  We love using clay as a medium and we thought it was just the material we needed to mold manatees.  We took time looking at pictures of manatees. Children commented on their "fat," "oval" bodies and the "whiskers" on their faces. We spent some time rolling, flattening and pinching clay between or fingers and then eventually let the children mold their final product.  Some children made "mom manatees with their baby." While others made lines on their backs to show scares from "...a boat going to fast." 

  For our Spring celebration the children are learning a song called the Florida alphabet.  This has started many great conversations about things you might find in our State.  The children got excited to make their own Florida alphabet. Using colored pencils and white paper the children drew their own version of each page of the book. The interest was so high in this activity many of the children picked more than one letter to draw.  The children were so inspired by this song that it has started many more conversations about the places and creatures depicted in the song. Along with practicing for our Spring celebration performance we are reading books about our beautiful State. It has sparked some  real curiosity about some of the living things that call Florida their home. 

We have been very busy at Imagine getting ready for Valentine's Day. We painted newspaper and cut out beautiful hearts to decorate our classroom, our Valentine's cards, and the bags to hold all our treats. The seniors worked to write invitations to our Valentine's Day lunch. Everyone worked hard creating a beautiful Valentine for their parents.  There is always so much anticipation for the big day.  There are balloons, sweet treats and so many smiling faces.  A very happy love day to all our wonderful Imagine families!

  During our Bee exploration we learned all the parts of a bee's body. We decided to use this knowledge to mold bees out of clay.  We made sure to add all the parts we had learned about and include the correct number of antennae and legs. Clay is a medium the children love to work with and this was a great way for them to show us what they learned.

Last week we mixed paint to match the different shades of honey. We painted with some of those shades on a large piece of butcher block paper. When the " honey" was dry we invited the children to stamp hexagons on the yellow shades of paint to create honeycomb. They used a brush to apply the paint to the sides of the wooden hexagon and then stamped them on the paper. They really took their time stamping the shapes next to each other trying to create a mural that really resembles honeycomb.  We aren't sure yet what we are going to do with our honeycomb mural. Maybe we need to make some bees! 

While tracing a honey bee on our light table the children learned about all the different parts of a Bee.  In our tasting room we sampled three different kinds of honey.  We asked the question, "why are they different colors?" , and "why do they taste different?" One of our friends was quick to tell us "they are from different flowers".  We created a tally graph so we could keep track of how many people liked each of the different kinds of honey. We did some counting and discovered that the class liked the wildflower honey the best.