Our New Building Wall

We converted the back of a bookshelf into a building wall by adding pegboard hooks, recycled containers, and wire to it! We encouraged the children to experiment with attaching materials to the building wall. It was quite challenging and excellent fine motor control!

There was a lot of rich discussion happening regarding how to build on this wall and what the children were hoping to accomplish at the center.

One of our children figured out how to make a marble run!  Wow! We can't wait to see what other inquiries happen here!

Exploring Numbers and Quantity at the Light Table

We thought we'd make an ordinary math activity exciting for the children by putting transparencies with numbers, words, and quantity at the light table. The children were invited to decorate the numerals or count out the correct number of gems for each number card. It was quite popular!

Some children made patterns when decorating their numerals too!

Sparkly Play Dough Creatures

We made a very appealing batch of sparkly black play dough for the children to use with odds and ends from our art area.  The children were intrigued by the wonderful contrast between the dark colour of the dough and the iridescent sparkles.

Their creatures were out of this world!

 

Outdoor Mud Kitchen

Looking for a great way to engage your children outside? Creating a mud kitchen (at school or in your backyard) is an amazing way to encourage creativity, math, and language development in children while engaging them in play outdoors.  We have been inspired by recent blogs that have demonstrated easy ways to create outdoor kitchens.

This weekend I helped my children to create a mud kitchen in our backyard. We used an old wooden box with layers, our play kitchen utensils (real ones would be much better), and whatever we could find in our backyard. My children were so engaged in the experience and it was interesting to watch them play cooperatively together for over an hour - picking ingredients for their 'stew', measuring out what they needed, and pretending to taste and re-taste their creations.

Goop!

Mrs. Bombardier put out one of our favourite messy activities...GOOP!  Goop is cornstarch and water mixed together with some food colouring. Just enough water is added to the cornstarch so that it is wet and will drip through one's fingers when picked up, but dry enough so it is hard to the touch when in the sensory bin. It is messy and so much fun!

Goop is interesting because it acts like both a solid and liquid - this intrigued our children especially after our experiments with melting crayons earlier in the week. We added tools like funnels, spoons, and bowls to the goop to enhance the exploration.

Weaving

We wanted to engage the children in an activity that would help strengthen their fine motor skills and create a communal piece of artwork. We placed out a piece of chicken wire (with the edges taped) and a basket full of wonderful ribbons, pipecleaners, and strips of colourful fabrics. The children were encouraged to try and weave the materials through the chicken wire.

After a day on the art table, we taped the wire to the back of a bookshelf so that it could be permanently displayed as both a piece of artwork and as a place where the children could work on their weaving any time they wanted to. We left the basket next to the shelf and plan to add new weaving materials to it periodically in order to re-interest children in the experience.

Ambulance!

Mr. Basinski brought the ambulance to school on Thursday for the children to see! We were so excited! Before we went outside to check out the vehicle, Mr. Basinski spent time explaining all the special equipment that he uses for his job and reading us a story about staying safe.

Once outside we got to go through the ambulance. The children were very interested in all the specialized equipment that Mr. Basinski uses when driving the ambulance and in how the ambulance looked and sounded with the lights and siren on!

Thank you for a wonderful visit!

Colour Dropping

We love any activity that involves colour mixing! We also love activities that strengthen children's fine motor skills which will help them to become confident writers later on. We had some lovely plastic trays donated to our classroom, and we decided to fill them up with water. In a few spots on each tray, we coloured the water with the primary colours using blue, red, and yellow food colouring.

Using droppers and pipettes, the children were invited to mix the colours by dropping colours from one section of the tray to the other.

The results were stunning!