Thursday, January 29, 2015

The Bear Cave

I used the frame for our sensory table to create a bear cave this week.
It was a fun little nook for playing, reading, and of course, pretending to hibernate.
Scary bear face!
We also did a bear cave craft:


Thursday, January 22, 2015

Exploring a Polar Bear's Habitat

This week we have been using our sensory bin as a polar bear habitat. I first set it up like this, using some leftover styrofoam from a package.
This looked really awesome, but the styrofoam didn't turn out to be the best play material to work with. While I had envisioned maybe building with the styrofoam blocks, the play evolved into simply demolishing the styrofoam, which was mostly just messy and noisy. Live and learn! :)

So for the next day, I made this recipe for "snow dough" and we tried that in the bin instead. It was still messy, but overall a more pleasant sensory experience for everyone.



Today we explored this question:

How do polar bears stay warm in their arctic habitat?

First we tried holding some ice in our hands to feel how cold it is. Most of the students could only hold it for 5-10 seconds before their hand was too cold. So how do polar bears stay warm in the ice and snow? A few students guessed that the polar bear's fur keeps them warm.




So we tried holding ice with gloves, pretending like we had polar bear fur on our hands. Everyone agreed it was easy to hold the ice with gloves, and their hands stayed warm. But what about when polar bears swim in the ice cold water? Is their fur enough to keep them warm?

Next we tried dipping our hands in the ice water with the gloves on. At first, the gloves seemed to keep their hands warm, but eventually the water seeped though and it got pretty cold.

It was hard to think of ways that polar bears can stay warm in the water, even when their fur is wet. So I pulled out another tool that I had prepared for us to explore with- a bag full of fat. (Really, it was two ziploc bags filled with shortening, sealed shut, and then placed inside another ziploc bag.)
Everyone took a turn putting one hand inside the shortening bag and one hand in the water without any covering.

The hand in the bag stayed warm!

This exploration was a great way to experience and talk about how polar bears have special fur, and a layer of fat underneath that fur that helps them to thrive in their icy habitat. I left the ice bucket out in the sensory bin so the students could continue to explore throughout center time.
In the end, the favorite activity was taking the polar bears for an icy swim.

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Polar Bear Art: Preschool Style

One of my students this year loves polar bears. Because I know this student loves polar bears so much, I've been really excited to use them as a focus topic during our winter unit. Today we tried out a step-by-step art project to create polar bears. I was inspired by this art project. It was completed by older students and I didn't have the same pastel chalk that they used, but I did my best to adapt it for our classroom.
I thought the results were really fun, and so great for preschool art. I love that even though I took the students step-by-step through the shapes, each bear turned out so differently. 
We had also been experimenting with white crayons and watercolor paint, so some students chose to use that as a background for their polar bear. (Although, if I did the project again, I would stick with a more solid background next time, like the examples I was looking at.)


Monday, January 19, 2015

On the Felt Board: Elmo's World

My toddler has a small Elmo doll, that prompted him to add "Meh-mo" to his list of words a couple months ago. Since then he has started to recognize Elmo in items at the store or in books, and gets really excited about an occasional episode of "Elmo's World" on YouTube. Recently, his little high-pitched "Meh-mo" has evolved into asking for "Eh-mo" on a regular basis. So this week I thought it might be fun to go with that interest, and add some Elmo felt pieces to the board in his room.

I hot glued Elmo's eyes and nose to his face, but decided to leave his mouth as an extra piece. (As time goes by, we may use Elmo to explore different feeling faces...) I also made Elmo's pet fish, and then added some colorful shapes just for fun.


Besides my toddler's excitement over saying "Eh-mo" that much more throughout the day, it's also been a fun tool for developing language words like eyes, nose, and mouth. He is especially interested in finding Elmo's nose. :)

Friday, January 16, 2015

Visual Discrimination with Snowflakes

Part of learning to read is being able to notice very subtle differences between letters and words, both visually and aurally. For example, many students struggle at first to visually tell the difference between the letter "d" and "b," and frequently confuse the two letters. This month we've been spending some time practicing visual and sound discrimination, by using our eyes and ears to determine whether two items are the same or different.

I made these simple snowflake puzzles as a way to practice working with visual details. I purposefully selected some snowflakes that were similar in shape and form, but still different.
I printed each snowflake twice, placing one set onto black paper before laminating them all. I then cut the single snowflakes in half (which is also a great visual for showing snowflake symmetry). I first just set them out for the students to interact with. They could find snowflake matches in two ways- put the individual snowflakes together, or try to find the pieces that match the snowflakes on the black paper.
Some students found that while it wasn't too hard to find the matches, it could be tricky to line it up correctly onto the corresponding snowflake.
I also used the snowflakes during a whole group lesson, as we talked about how snowflakes form and how every snowflake is different.
Then we played a "find your partner" movement game, where each person had one half of a snowflake and danced with it during a song before finding the friend that had their match.

Thursday, January 15, 2015

Playing with Snow

It's been fun to use snow as a theme for our learning recently, especially since we've had some outside to work with. Here are some of the ways that we've been using snow to play and learn.

Snow Painting
Combining process art with sensory play. :)

Building Snow People
After one small storm the snow was perfect for building snowmen...and snowgirls.

Throwing "Snowballs"
We made some pretend snowballs out of crumpled paper, and used them for some letter recognition and sound practice. For one game, I hid sticky notes inside the snowballs with letters on them. After a round of snowball throwing, each student would open up a snowball, name the letter inside, and then crumple it back up for someone else to find. For another game, I taped both letters and numbers onto the snowballs and we sorted them by deciding whether it was a letter or number, and then throwing them into different containers.
(hard to get a good picture of this activity)
Epsom Salt Crystal "Snow" Painting
We also tried our hands at using Epsom salt to do some crystallized painting. It had been years since I've tried this activity, and I didn't quite get the ratio of salt to water right at first. But in the end, crystals formed on most of our paintings and it was neat to observe that process.

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Growing Ice

I thought this growing ice science activity from Teach Preschool looked really fun, so we gave it a try today...and it worked! I just did it as a whole group activity, but I may try it again and let the kids try to do their own pouring.

We started out with just a cup of ice. Each student made a prediction about what would happen if we poured water on it. Most agreed that the ice would melt and get watery.

I had prepared two water bottles in the freezer according to the directions on Teach Preschool. (Just as she suggests, you have to be very gentle with the bottles or they freeze too quickly.) When you pour the nearly frozen water onto the ice, the ice starts to grow!
The kids were amazed and eager to touch and feel it. It is basically slush and falls down almost instantly when you touch it.
We decided to try and make one as tall as we could without touching it.
Maybe we could have gone taller, but the water bottle froze over at that point, so we'll never really know...

Thursday, January 8, 2015

A Snowman Experiment

Over the holiday break we finally got some snow around here. On our first day back, I asked the students if they had any questions about snow or winter. One student asked why the snow stays on the ground. After seeing variations of this "snowman in a bag" idea all over the internet, I decided to use it as a backdrop for exploring why sometimes snow stays frozen and sometimes it melts.
Before school started I made these bags and filled them with equal amounts of snow. During our welcome circle, I let the students examine the bags and make predictions about what might happen to each bag if we left one outside and one inside. Then we put one outside and one inside, and went on with our day.
During every transition, we took a few minutes to check on the bags. Every time we checked, we discussed and wrote down our observations about the two bags.
The timing of our class was pretty much perfect because by the end of the class, the inside bag was almost completely melted by the end of the day, while the outside bag stayed frozen.

I was pleased with how well this activity turned out, and how engaged the kids were in checking the bags and talking about what was happening. They were pretty quick to make the connection that the bag inside melted because it was warmer inside, but I also tried to help them think about why snow stays frozen and then melts outside.

While we were outside at recess I pointed out that the snow melted in some places of the yard, but not in others, and asked them why they thought that was happening?
We noticed that the places in the yard with the most snow were mostly in the shade. This led to a great discussion about how the sun helps to warm up the air, and that if the air gets warm enough, the snow melts. We will keep exploring snow and the science behind it throughout the month, but this activity definitely got us off to a great start!
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