Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Book Love: The Shape of My Heart

As part of exploring shapes and getting ready for Valentine's day, we used one of my favorite shape books to inspire many of our activities:
This is the Shape of My Heart
I love that this book explores the concept of shapes, rather than just the typical math shapes that we often focus on exclusively. Everything has a shape, and it's easy for young children to make connections to the shapes they see in this book. 



Read-Aloud Tips: There's so much to see and explore on each page, and every time I read it there are children who want to touch and point out things on the page. So I embrace that enthusiasm, and try to make it as interactive as possible. We spend time pointing to our favorite foods, or playing "I Spy" with shapes on the page, etc. 

Connecting Activities: There are so many ways you could make connections to this book, but I found inspiration this year in the phrase at the end of the book, "this is the shape I love you with, this is the shape of my heart." 

Collaborative Heart Art
As part of our themes of friendship and community, we filled up these hearts together. 
Doing this as an invitation to create a collage was fun, but if I did this again, I would probably do paint and maybe even stickers.




Heart Shaped Threading




Heart Themed Sensory Bin 
with different sized hearts and cookie cutter shapes



Heart Drawing and Cutting


Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Hearts, Love, and Valentines

We've been all about hearts, love, and valentines the last couple weeks. 

Raining Hearts on the Parachute
I might have to do a separate post about how we used a favorite song with the parachute this year to make it "rain hearts." It was so fun. 

Lots of pink, purple, and red painting...


Hearts and Playdough



 Both classes became really interested in creating and comparing the different sizes of hearts. 





Invitation to Create Valentines
This was a simple set-up, with various materials to freely create valentines. It stayed really busy the whole time, and I loved seeing many students creating and writing who don't always choose writing activities. 
 We used our dramatic play mailbox to "send" valentines to friends in the class. 

 I even got a few sweet little valentine creations that made me smile. :) 
I loved watching different pairs of friends writing each other's names, drawing pictures, and then sharing little notes with each other. 

Fine Motor and Sensory Exploration
We used pipettes to explore what happens to Sweethearts candies in water.



Water Beads Sensory Bin

We pulled out the pipettes again to experiment with different colors on heart doilies.


L-O-V-E- Spells LOVE
We also talked a lot about the word love, including writing about things that we love

and singing about how to spell the word.

Spin Art for Valentine's Day

I always enjoying trying out a new art process, and I've been wanting to try out this "spin art" process using a salad spinner for quiet awhile. Like many new processes, I tried it out on my own time first. I knew that Gorilla (3.5 years) was going to love it, because he loves to help me spin salad at dinnertime. 

He really did love it, and wanted to do it over and over again. 
So I was excited to introduce the concept to my preschool classes. 
Everyone was eager to try this out, and some kids stayed at the table for basically the whole center time, trying things out over and over again. 
These two friends wanted to work together. :) 

I think one thing that made this activity so engaging was that the students could be mostly independent in this process: 
Squeezing the paint, placing the lid, and of course, pushing the spinner up and down. 

There was always a moment of excitement and wonder when we lifted the lid to see what happened.

My salad spinner was full of festive paint!
The kids loved this so much, that we ran out of paint! So we started to reuse the paint left in the bottom of the bowl. We used this process to create valentine hearts and the base for our Valentine mailboxes, although after those things were finished many kids started cutting out their own creations to try spinning in the bowl. We will definitely have to try this again some time!

Here's a peek at our Valentine mailboxes

And here are some of the hearts we created using this process. We thought of something nice we could say about each other as a class, and wrote that down on the back as sort of a class valentine for each student.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...