Imagine

Every Spring Imagine hosts a Spring celebration. We invite all our families to help us celebrate with performances, a picnic and planting our garden. The children in the preschool together decided this year we would perform " The Florida Alphabet ".  We thought it was a great choice because much of what we do in the preschool is explore the world we live in. Chosing The Florida Alphabet to learn, practice and perform was a culminatination of our year so far. This was a process that took about three weeks to bring to fruition. The children started by drawing their favorite page of the book. This step helped them when it became time to choose what costume they wanted to create for the show.  There was a lot of discussion about what materials we might use to make each costume.  The children cut, glued and painted in anticipation of our big day.  At the same time we were learning the song and all the hand movements.  The day of our celebration the children were read...

While learning about boats in class we had many conversations about how boats get from one place to another. During this time we observed a lighthouse in one of our classroom books.  Because lighthouses are so visually beautiful, we thought it would be a really great art project to add to the classroom.  We talked about the importance of lighthouses ( especially before electricity and GPS) and looked at various pictures of lighthouses. After, we traced lighthouses at the light table and added a bit of color by decorating them.  A few days later, we thought it might be a good idea to do a reference painting using the same lighthouse picture. First we drew the image, paying close attention to the lines and shapes and emulating that on our own paper. Then we painted the lighthouse drawings.  During this time we asked questions about who we think might live in the lighthouse. If lighthouses are " haunted", if animals can live in a lighthouse, and how a person can get to ...

We made a few interesting connections between fish, which if you follow our blog you know is a topic we have very recently explored,and boats which is a more recent interest in our class. We asked the class to think about being on a boat and asked them what they thought might be under the boat. Of course fish was the most popular answer but our friends also thought of "shells" , "rocks" , "turtles" and "manatee". It was a great way to revisit previous topics of inquiry and make connections to new. The children drew with colored pencils on white paper a picture depicting a boat floating on the water and what might lay beneath.