Happy New Year!

As often happens during the holiday season, I got pretty caught up in everything going on and behind in blogging, so we are starting fresh with the new year!

A New Year

The concept of time, months, years, etc. is still pretty abstract for preschool aged children, but we did spend a little bit of time thinking about the new year in our own way. We explored some calendars, thought about the different things that happen during the different months of the year (birthdays, holidays, seasonal weather, etc.), and how the months happen in the same order and cycle through every year.

Winter

This month our main focus will be on the season of winter. There are so many things to explore in each season, that every year looks a little different depending on what is actually happening in our area and what the students are interested in. This year we haven't had much snow yet, so we began by thinking about the colder temperatures.

We used water beads to explore changes that happen when something freezes.  

 After spending some time with our regular water beads, we put some of them in the freezer. The beads looked and felt quite differently after they froze, and the kids came up with a lot of good observations and questions as they explored like, why do the beads stick together when they are frozen? Why do they feel harder? This was a great introduction into different states of matter.

Hot Chocolate Math

As we've talked about the things we can do to stay warm in the winter, one favorite is hot chocolate. This is a simple math game that we play to practice one-to-one correspondence and counting those tricky teen numbers. 

Waiting for Snow

We read a book about some animals who try all sorts of silly things to get it to snow, but in the end they just have to wait for snow to come when it does. It seemed a fitting book for this year, and we'll just keep playing with our own kinds of "snow" until we get some to explore outside. 

One class became very interested in creating snow with paper punches.

We made a snowy world on the light table.

And we've been doing different kinds of winter inspired art, like this snowy spin art project.