I had the opportunity to go to a great Early Childhood workshop this past weekend, and saw a couple of great speakers. The first one was Eric Litwin, the author of the "Pete the Cat" books. If you have never read these books, I highly recommend you check them out. I did not previously own them, but that will be changing soon! There's just something about seeing a story performed live by it's author that really brings it to life. I learned some really great songs and activities from Eric that I am excited to share with the kids.
The second speaker of the day was named Sharron Krull. I was reminded of something she said as we did this color sorting activity together today. One of her sessions was on physical activity, movement and play for kids. She said, "If it is in their body, it is in their brain!" referring to the way that kids receive and retain information so much better when their whole body can get involved. It really is true and I saw this point in action today as the kids played with colors.
Their task was to watch for me to show them a colored piece of construction paper, then call out what color it was. I would then tape the paper to the floor as they ran around finding objects of that color.
They got pretty good at it, and by the time we got to the end of our rainbow, they were coming to the papers with arms full of monochromatic objects. :)
I have been putting off our usual winter "melting/freezing" lesson because below freezing daytime temperatures have been unusually hard to come by so far! But last week, (of all times...we had a 60 degree January day last week!) the kids started the lesson all on their own! Some of them may have remembered doing it last year, but for whatever reason, they asked if they could bring in some of the ice chunks they had found out in the backyard that morning. So we put them in a glass bowl and watched to find out what would happen.
Once we had that figured out, we took advantage of the unseasonably warm weather and tried the experiment in reverse. I filled our bowl with ice cubes from the freezer and we took them outside. The kids observed that a day warm enough to play without a coat is also warm enough to melt ice. :)
Today we continued our fun with ice in a new way. I made us some colorful ice cubes by adding a few drops of liquid watercolor. Once they were frozen we poured them into our sensory tubs. I also added a couple bowls of salt for the kids to experiment with.
I'll admit I was both excited and surprised when they asked if they could have some string (to recreate our "Ice on a String" experiment from a few weeks ago). So, we added some string, and started playing! The kids had fun seeing the changes that the salt made in the ice, and noticing the difference between the table salt and larger sea salt's effects. And to top it all off, this activity fit in perfectly with our letter of the week (letter "I" for Ice!) so we tried using our watercolor ice cubes to paint with, too!
We had fun with a shiny New Year's art project today. We talked a little bit about what New Years is, and if any of them got to stay up late, or go to a party over the weekend. No one said that they got to use confetti to ring in the New Year, so we used a little of our own today. :)
We had some paper punch "confetti" left over from one of the times they got to play with the paper punch, and some very shiny confetti scraps that I had. And, I decided to set out some paint brushes to encourage them to spread the glue around a little bit, so they had fun with that, too. Then, we added some paper triangle shapes to represent party hats or horns, and a little "Happy New Year" banner to top it all off.
The kids called these their "party papers" and I'm pretty sure their favorite part was that they didn't have to stick to our usual chant of "just a dot, not a lot!" but got to use just about as much glue as they wanted. :)
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