Today was a great day to play with anything cool so we got out some colored ice cubes that I had been saving. 
The kids had fun laying them out on some of our tree rounds, watching the colors melt together, noticing how quickly they melted in the sun, 
...burying them in the sand, 
...and even adding them into their mud mixtures! 
Add Comment  Color, color, color! The two weeks leading up to St. Patrick's Day were filled with all the colors of the rainbow around here. We did lots of painting and color mixing (I provided only the primary colors and we discovered what happens when they mix together!) to make a giant rainbow, in hopes that it might bring a leprechaun to hide his gold here!  And it worked! :) We had a mischievous leprechaun stop by and turn our milk green, and he even turned the toilet water green! He also left us some fun surprises: a "pot of rainbow" and some green glow bracelets! He left a note, so we learned that his name is Sneaky O'Malley!  We had lots of other color fun too, like our baking soda and vinegar play, with red jell-o powder added in. An idea that came from Footsteps In Growing Daycare that we had a lot of fun with. When the kids were all done playing with the bubbling reaction, we used the resulting mush to paint with. It left an interesting textured product that smelled wonderful! :)  We also had fun with flubber, and a new-to-us sensory material: Rainbow dough. We have made cloud dough before -- it consists of flour and baby oil. Since the only moisture comes from the oil, when we added colors one at a time, they didn't mix together but stayed separate as we played to become rainbow dough! It is shown here after we had only added green, but Play Counts has some fun pictures of the dough with all colors added.  We had fun with rainbow strips of paper available in the art area all week,  ...and our new rainbow sensory bottles! We also learned a couple of new songs that you may have been hearing at home! If not, ask the kids to sing you the Rainbow song, or the Leprechaun song that they learned!  We even got to EAT a rainbow with these colorful rainbow fruit kabobs and explore new and fun green foods, like avocado.  We worked together to build a tape rainbow and then used it as the base for our rainbow color scavenger hunt! Some of the kids are really getting good at ripping tape off the rolls....such HARD work for little fingers! But they are very motivated to learn how, so they work, work, work at it! 
We had so much fun learning and playing with colors! In anticipation of St. Patrick's Day, we have begun talking about leprechauns and rainbows and have decided to try to gather as much rainbow color as we can over the next two weeks so that maybe a leprechaun will come here to hide or find his gold! :) We have started with the color red, so today the kids really wanted to make RED flubber (they like to call it "slime"). We added in some pieces of red yarn and some cups and spoons and the kids spent the better part of the morning building a wide variety of "leprechaun traps" as they told stories of what they would like to do if they ever meet a leprechaun. :) 
We had so much fun last week celebrating Dr. Seuss's birthday! For the past couple of years, I think it has been the favorite "holiday" around here! This year I brought out some old favorites (like painting with our feet, and then reading the Foot Book) as well as some new activities, art projects, and fun foods. The kids had fun using tissue paper scraps to fill in their Red fish & Blue fish, and loved dipping cotton balls into colored water to make colorful Truffula tree-tops!  In addition to the fun art projects, we enjoyed some great Dr. Seuss themed games and activities, too. The kids did some impressive building and patterning with our new Cat In the Hat foam stacking blocks, sharpened their fine-motor skills with some Tuffula tree beading, and even got to Hop on Pop!  Of course we can't celebrate Dr. Seuss without having some Green Eggs & Ham, but we also had fun with lots of other Dr. Seuss themed meals and snacks. One of their favorites was the fish cracker graphing along with some Pink Ink Drink (also from One fish, Two fish, Red fish, Blue fish). We had colorful Lorax pasta with broccoli and asparagus "trees" and a blue alfredo river, played with Brown Bar-ba-loot bears and built our own Truffula trees (from the Lorax) using pretzel sticks and mini colored marshmallows, and at the suggestion of one of the kids, we even had a birthday cake for Dr. Seuss!  We enjoyed celebrating Dr. Seuss once again and are now looking forward to lots of rainbow fun in the next couple of weeks, building up to St. Patrick's Day!  Our Valentine "Heart Hop" game turned out to be an even bigger hit than I could have predicted! I have decided that I might just have to choose other shapes and ALWAYS have numbered shapes taped to my floor! :) I placed the hearts on the floor in the hallway that connects our toy room to the rest of the house, so every time the kids took that path, they were counting as they went! We used them for various follow-the-directions type of games, but even before I led them in any of that, the kids were hopping, jumping, counting (forwards AND backwards), and even organizing and communicating their own games. They also were able to reason that if this heart shows the number 7, and has 7 dots on it, then maybe that word there says "seven!" 
And, the hearts were a great way to get out some of that BIG energy that is always so abundant on holiday party days! 
We also had lots of fun with our themed breakfast and lunch, Valentine balloon play, painting, decorating Valentine treat bags (which led to a puppet-making session and puppet show!), and the highlight of course, passing out the Valentines they had brought for their friends. As I played our newest photo slideshow movie yesterday for the kids, they watched with almost constant repeating commentary of, "We should do THAT again! We should do THAT again!" What a great gift it was for me to be reminded of how much fun they had with the activities pictured from our past year together. Although we'll have to wait a while to recreate some of the photos (like swimming, which several of them asked if we could do today! :) ), we were able to cross one off the list today. I filled up the spray bottles with water and liquid water color and they set to work painting the snow in the backyard! I always know it's a winner when they add that day's activities to their list of "Thank you God for..." at our lunch time prayer as they did today. :) 
Today we did a simple finger-painting activity (which usually turns into an "up-to-the-elbows" painting activity for at least a few of the kids!) to make some beautiful fall trees! We first talked about how our trees have been changing, and I had the kids tell me which colors they have seen on the trees. Using those colors, they then painted their tree-tops and we stuck those into the cardboard tube trunks. 
Our beautiful fall forest!
 The kids and I have had so much fun with our color wheel project over the past several weeks! As we wrap it up this week, I had the kids help me sort out some purple objects to fill in the last section of the big color wheel. They also each got to make their own color wheel to take home with them. We started the individual color wheels out with a few dabs of paint for them to spread and mix together. 
My favorite part was hearing the kids announce what was happening as they mixed the secondary colors, "I mixed blue and red and I made purple!" :) Once the kids had finished painting, I set out a bowl of small colorful items for them to sort into each section of their color wheel. 
Since adding objects to our big color wheel has been an exciting part of our day for so many weeks, they are very excited to have their very own color wheels to take home with them! We have been having a lot of fun with the color green this week, including a couple of different ways to see how we can make green. First, we started with a tub of blue and a tub of yellow water beads, and the kids mixed some of each together for us to observe. Since the water beads absorb and release moisture, they all exchanged their colors and we ended up with a bowl of green water beads! 
Today, we played with some big clear bags of paint. Each bag had both blue and yellow paint inside, so as the kids drew and wrote with their fingers on the bags, they mixed the two colors together to make green! 
On Friday we set up a science demonstration with these cups of colored water and a couple of paper towels. The activity is similar to the Walking Water Science we did last fall and some of the older kids even remembered doing it the other way and asked if we could do that again, so we'll probably have to try that out again next week! :) The ones who remembered our previous setup knew that the paper towels were going to soak up, or "absorb" the water and that they would carry it into the center cup. They also "predicted" (we used lots of fun science words!) that the blue and yellow would combine to make green! 
As we checked on our cups throughout the day, we "observed" the colors slowly start to travel into the center cup... 
where they would indeed continue to mix together to make green! | More ways to join the fun!:
Welcome!Welcome to Hilary's Home Daycare & Preschool! Take a look through these pages to get a glimpse of what our days are like! If your child is currently enrolled in Hilary's Home Daycare, be sure to check out the "Look what we did today!" section often to join in our fun! Childcare Openings:Currently, Hilary's Home Daycare has no childcare positions available. If you would like to be added to our waiting list, please submit a message under the "Contact Me" tab. Be sure to include the words "waiting list," your child(ren)'s age(s), and the best way to contact you for an interview, should a spot become available. Thank you! ArchivesJuly 2013 CategoriesAll |
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