APRIL

This time of year always starts to go by SO FAST. Suddenly it's the last week of April, and I realized I haven't blogged all month long. We have had a great month thinking about spring and insects, especially the two live insects we have been studying. Here are a few highlights!

Flowers in the Spring

We explored flowers with sensory play and art.

Bugs and Insects

We learned about bugs, and explored how insects have certain characteristics like 6 legs, 2 antannae, and 3 body parts. We also thought about how insects help our world. 

Ladybugs and Butterflies

We started our life cycle study with 2 live insects this year- ladybugs and butterflies. Both of these insects go through a metamorphosis, and we've been comparing their different stages and waiting to see which one hatches first. 

We've done different activities along with this, including making art, writing in our journals, and reading our favorite books. 

Friendship Fun

I've also been trying to encourage some more cooperative types of play in the classroom, and we've been trying our some partner activities as one way to work and play together. 

We've enjoyed welcoming spring this month, even though we had some lingering winter weather...

I can't believe we're already getting ready for our last month of school! It's going to be a lot of fun!

Rainbows

I say it every year, but rainbows are my favorite thing to explore with young kids. They are great for reviewing colors, sorting, ordering, science concepts, and all the colors together are just so happy. Here are a few of the rainbow activities we tried this year.

Rainbow Order

This year I used Kwik Stix to teach about the order of rainbow colors. Ordering is a math skill that goes hand in hand with counting, so it's fun to integrate it into the colors of the rainbow as well. We do a group art activity to draw a rainbow in color order, and Kwik Stix were the perfect art tool to make taking turns with each color go by smoothly. 

 We added cotton balls to the top so that we could add the next process to this project.

On another day we let it "rain" on our rainbows with some drip painting. 

Collaborative Rainbow

We also explored color mixing with this fun and messy :) collaborative art project, inspired by the book Beautiful Hands. 

We made on row of the rainbow at a time using only primary colors, so for the secondary colors we did a little hands-on color mixing. 

Weather Fun

The kids this year really seemed to enjoy our space exploration, and we slowly transitioned from that exciting topic into the night and day sky, and weather. 

Ivory Soap Cloud Experiment

To build some excitement about clouds and weather in the sky, we tried the classic Ivory Soap in the microwave experiment. In all my years of teaching, this is actually the first time I've ever used it! 

It was like magic. :)  

The resulting clouds are puffy and crumbly, and made for a fun sensory experience. 

After we explored their initial texture, we tried adding water. At the end of two preschool classes, what was left was a soapy slime mixture that most of the kids did not want to touch, but it was fun to stick stuff into it. I somehow missed taking a picture of that though. 

We paired our cloud activities with Eric Carle's book, Little Cloud, and created some squishy cloud art inspired by the illustrations. Each of our cloud creations turned out differently, and we decided what we thought they looked like. It was fun to hear each response- kids this age can be both literal and imaginative, so some thought their clouds looked like "a cloud" and some thought they were like a "puppy" or a "doughnut with a lot of holes."

Later in the month we also explored rain with another favorite cloud book, Cloudette. 

Raining Cloud Experiment

This is one of my favorite processes to use with preschool students because it always looks so cool. We fill up the clouds (shaving cream) with colored water until it starts to rain.