The Parts of a Sunflower

We explored the parts of a sunflower by making our own.

First we painted paper plates for our sunflower's head.

After they dried, we practiced our scissor snipping skills by doing a fringe cut around the edges to make petals.

Then we used Q-Tips to paint the seeds in the middle of the head. 

Then we hung them up with stems and leaves to make a sunflower garden.

 We also labeled our large class sunflowers with word cards.

Math Bags and Writing Journals

This year I decided to change up my end-of-the-day routines to include math and writing on a regular basis. As with all the regular routines that I use in my classroom, I wanted these routines to be simple enough to be consistent, but also allow room for growth and individualization.

Math Bags

I found this idea for Math Bags on my favorite preschool blog, Teach Preschool, and wanted to try it out this as our weekly math routine. I love it because it is simple, very open-ended, and it allows the kids to be invested in the manipulatives we are using. So every Tuesday the students are bringing in up to 5 small, miscellaneous items from home that they are willing to donate to what we've been calling our "Math Collection."

First, everyone gets a chance to share what they brought, like a mini show-and-tell. This part of the process is a great chance for the kids to practice their oral language skills, and hopefully develop confidence with math vocabulary as the year progresses as well. Sometimes the kids will share stories with us about where they found the items, and sometimes they will just tell us what they brought. I always encourage them to count and tell us how many items there are, which allows me to observe their development of number sense and one-to-one correspondence.

How we interact with the items after the sharing time will vary throughout the year. Right now we are focusing on careful counting strategies, like lining the items up and touching them as we count.

This week we added sorting to the routine, and organized the items by color.

So far, I feel like it has been a successful routine and I'm excited to watch it grow and adapt as the students build their mathematical understanding. As our collection grows, I am also planning to include the items for different math activities in center choices time as well.

Writing Journals

The second routine that I've added to the end of the day is writing in our journals on Thursdays. Their writing journals are always available to them during center time, and many students use them on a regular basis for their own creative purposes. But I wanted to devote some additional time to writing about common learning topics together so that students could learn from each other and we could focus on specific writing skills where appropriate. 

Of course, writing in preschool is very developmental and can be as simple as making marks on the page. No matter the stage of writing development among my students, I emphasize the meaning behind whatever they are scribbling, drawing, or trying to write by asking them to tell me about their work. Then I model the writing process by recording what they tell me on the paper. 

This is also a great way for me to check in with the information they are processing and learning from our theme units. For example, today I prompted the students to write about sunflowers today since that has been our focus topic. It was interesting to hear the different aspects of sunflowers that each student focused on as they told me about their writing. Some told me about how the seeds come from the head of the flower, and some told me about the parts of the flower like the petals and the long, green stem, etc. 

 

As a teacher, I love using writing journals consistently because it is such a visual way to document growth over time. It's such a simple routine, and I'm glad that I've found a regular place for it in our weekly schedule. 

Color Mixing

Last week the kids were talking on their own at the snack table, and the topic of mixing colors together to make new colors came up for discussion. It's always interesting to observe conversations like this, because it gives me such a great glimpse into their different levels of understanding.  After they discussed it for a few minutes, I joined in and suggested that we learn more about colors and what happens when they mix together. Everyone agreed it would be fun to learn more. I love it when I can prepare activities based on their interests and inquiries!

There are a lot of fun books that explore primary and secondary colors, but today we read a simple one called Mouse Paint. We actually read Mouse Shapes last week, so it also allowed us to make a little text-to-text connection as well.

I prepared some plastic bags with "paint puddles," like in the story, that we could use as we read.

During the story, we pretended like our fingers were little mice feet and mixed up the colors together.

We mixed until we could see bits of the new color starting to form, and then we set the bags out for further exploration and mixing during center choices time.

I also set out some finger paint and white paper to see what other kinds of Mouse Paint color mixing art the students might create.

We ended up with some pretty colorful masterpieces!

Are You as Tall as a Sunflower?

Another plant we've been exploring in my yard this fall is sunflowers. I had two sunflower plants mature and bloom this year.

By the time school started, both had started to droop and dry out. We've been checking every school day to see if the seeds in the middle are ready to harvest yet.

We decided to make some big sunflowers for our classroom. Last week we measured the height of our sunflowers using string. We also worked together to paint some large pieces of paper yellow so we could make the petals.

Over the weekend, I put the flowers together and hung them up on the wall.

Then every student had the chance to stand underneath one of the flowers to compare their height with both the sunflower and the other students in the class. We did this by writing our name on a green paper leaf, and using that leaf to mark the height along the stem of the flower.

Early Pumpkin Harvest

Last spring, my husband and I planted our first garden. We decided to start small, and only planted a few different things to try out. Among some other produce, I wanted to plant some pumpkins and sunflowers that I could use with my preschool class. It has definitely been a learning experience for us. Out of the 12 sunflower sprouts that I planted, only 2 survived. The pumpkin plants were doing awesome until this last month, when all of our squash plants developed a powdery fungus on the leaves and started to die. Thankfully there were already plenty of Jack-Be-Little pumpkins growing before that happened.

Although I had planned to wait until October, the preschool kids didn't mind at all that we harvested them a little early due to the dying plant. They were eager to jump in and find a pumpkin...or two...or five...to pick.

Through this activity, we were able to observe and experience:

• how pumpkins are attached to the vine as they grow
•  how they turn different shades of yellow/orange as they mature
• how to twist and pull a pumpkin off the vine
• that the stem is what's left of the vine after you pull it off 
• that pumpkins can be a bit dirty because they are sitting on the ground as they grow

We ended up with quite a large collection of pumpkins! After our two days of harvesting, we took a final count.

Exactly 30 pumpkins!

Honestly, I was a bit surprised at just how many there were, but I'm excited there are so many for us to use and explore this fall!