Imagine

Every year the children make a gift to give their parents at our Winter potluck.  This year we made these beautiful wildflower seed bombs. We started out by ripping, tearing and cutting tissue paper, paper towels and scrap paper for the paper pulp that would dry and become our seed bombs. We used a blender and food color, mixed the seeds in and formed the stars in a cookie cutter.  The card part of the gift are lovely watercolor paintings of wildflowers.  The final step was gluing the message on their card and writing their name. In a related activity we looked up each wildflower in our seed mix. We “googled” what their seed looked like and found each seed in our mix. The children used a magnifying glass to see the detail of each seed. This sorting and identifying activity was extremely popular with the class.  I have to be honest here. I have no experience making seed bombs and I’m really not much of a gardener so if flowers grow from these seed bombs I will be very...

  We set out shaving cream and baking soda and using their hands the children mixed the ingredients to create a “snow” like mixture.  As an educator the whole concept of snow is a tricky subject to tackle with these little ones because as Florida kids most of them have no actual experience with the real thing. So it’s something they see in movies or in books. We asked the question, “what is snow?”  One of our friends told us, “ it falls from the sky”. I asked “like rain?” All agreed yes like rain but also not rain. We wondered what is different about rain and snow?  Someone said “it’s close to ice that falls from the sky”. We talked about ice and how “it’s cold”, “like from the freezer”.   So why doesn’t it snow in Florida? “Because it’s too warm” one of our friends reported. I pointed out well sometimes it’s cold here, we have to wear sweaters and coats even. Another friend said, “it has to be a lot, lot cold”. So the general understanding was that to snow in F...

This year we made garland and snowflakes to decorate our classroom. You might think that they are just decorations but when we examine each activity you notice that there is a lot of “learning” going on under the surface. The garlands were crafted with a needle and thread, cotton balls and cut pieces of candy cane colored straws. This activity was particularly great fine motor practice. We are really working on our hand eye coordination in so many ways!  We also took the opportunity to introduce simple AB patterns with this activity.  Patterns are an important early skill that help form a foundation for later math concepts. They are also important for language and literacy development. So much of our learning is in the fun we are having whether it be playing dress up or building with blocks to making holiday decorations for our classroom.  It’s in all the things we do every day at Imagine.  We made the snowflakes using tissue paper cut into circles. We chose tissue p...