Imagine

We have a Halloween tradition at Imagine.  Every year the week before the holiday everyone gets a chance to draw a jack o lantern face.  One of the faces will be the design we carve into our classroom pumpkin. Last week all our friends had a chance to trace a pumpkin on our light table.  Drawing our own jack o lantern faces gives us the chance to draw our own circles. We talk about how many eyes, where the nose goes and general placement of all the parts. We looked at different jack o lanterns to get ideas.  There are happy faces and there are scary faces. We talked about different shapes like triangles and noticed that many jack o lantern faces have triangle eyes and noses.  It was interesting to see that most of our friends chose to make their eyes and noses round so everyone had great practice drawing circles. The day before we carve the pumpkin we vote on the design that we will use when we carve our jack o lantern. This is always a great opportunity to talk...

Halloween is just around the corner and we are making decorations. As a continuation of our circle theme we decided to make pumpkins.  The children wrapped glue soaked yarn around balloons.  When they were dry we popped the balloon and what is left is our pumpkin! We are finishing them with brown and green chenille sticks to represent stems and leaves. In a connected activity the children traced pumpkins on our light table. 

The children created beautiful compositions using loose parts. The concept behind this invitation was to encourage the children to explore circles. They were able to engage and explore circles of all different sizes, shapes and colors.  Working with loose parts allows for an environment that supports a child’s creativity and inventiveness.  If you want to know more about  the theory behind loose parts please see the print out on our red room bulletin board.  In a related activity we set up a provocation that asked the children to create their own circles.  Did you know that every circle starts out as a line? The idea of the line is a concept we will be exploring more in the future. 

   Taste is certainly one of everybody’s favorite sense. We explored this sense by making lemonade. This cool citrus squeezer provoked many questions. Everyone was so curious as to just what this unusual new object in our classroom was. Instead of the children saying what they thought it was we talked about what a “question” is and encouraged the children to ask questions instead. We got some great questions. “Does it pump out water?", “Does it make holes in paper?”, “Can it move?”. By the time we started the activity the children knew what it did because someone asked their parent at pick up time. He shared this information with the class.  We placed the citrus squeezer out on a table along with lemons, sugar and water and set out to figure out how it worked.   We couldn’t put the whole lemon in so we thought we should try cutting the lemon in half. The children explored the handle and figured out which way it moved. Everyone had to use all their muscles to get all ...

We’ve started a conversation about our 5 senses. We decided to focus first on our sense of sight.  What does the word sight mean? From what part of our body do we see? Can all animals see? What would it be like if we couldn’t see?  We ventured out on our playground to have a look around. What do we see? This time of year our golden rain tree is dropping tiny yellow flowers and our playground is covered in a yellow flower blanket. It’s hard to miss it.  For our first sight activity we gave the children tongs and a container and invited them to collect the flowers using the tongs. We asked if they could try to only pick up one flower at a time and try not to get any dirt along with the flower. It’s a bit tricky but certainly doable. When the collecting was complete each child had the opportunity to count the flowers that they collected. This was a great fine motor activity that required hand-eye coordination and lots of concentration. This activity could not be done without...