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Showing posts from October, 2016

Happy Halloween 2016!

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Our final Halloween activity in the preschool is to carve our jack-o-lantern.  It's our tradition to have each child draw a design that they would like to see carved into our classroom pumpkin.  We talk about how we can't use everyone's design so we need to figure out a way to pick one. This is how we introduce the idea of voting. The designs are numbered. We leave the children's names out of the voting process to avoid hurt feelings.  The best way that we have found to include the children in the carving process is to use golf tees and a block as a hammer. It's a great, safe fine motor skill activity.  Happy Halloween!

Creepy Spider Webs

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Halloween spirit is in full swing in the preschool! We have been reading books and singing songs and talking about all the images associated with this holiday.  We made spooky spider webs using three different mediums.  The first was simply white oil pastel and chalk on black paper. We really took our time observing a web. They are not as easy to draw as you might think! The second way was with yarn . It involved a bit of weaving. This activity also turned out to be a bit tricky.  The third was using white paint, marbles and a shoe box. 

Goblins

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In one of our Halloween songs, the children noticed a spooky character they didn't know -- a goblin.  We asked them what they thought a goblin looked like. Quinn told us "they are green with pointy ears", Silas told us "they have 3 eyeballs", Collins said, "goblins have pointy hats". We had a great conversation about what they might eat and what they do. This segued into a rich discussion about Halloween and all the "scary" things associated with the holiday. We talked about the word "pretend" and how all the spooky stuff is not real. Collins told us "pretend means you make stuff up".  We asked the children to draw what they thought goblins look like. We got some pretty scary looking stuff!

Goblins part 2

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We set out various loose materials and clay and invited the children to create goblins again. This time in a "3 dimensional " way.  Using sticks, straws, pipe cleaners, buttons and wire along with clay, the children had a great time making the spooky creatures inside their heads come to life. Please look for them on the window sill in the red room and the shelf in the studio. 

Colored Leaves

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We used water soluble crayons to decorate leaves from the playground. Some of our children had fun drawing lines and scribbles, while others took the time to follow the veins of the leaves and make it as symmetrical as possible.  We used a hole puncher and strung the leaves on colored yarn. We hung them in our studio. They look beautiful!

The Lines In Leaves

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One of the places we noticed lines when we were looking for them on our playground was in leaves.  Since the weather was starting to change and feel more like fall, we had also been discussing the changing colors of the leaves.  We thought it would be fun to trace leaves on the light table and draw the lines we noticed on the inside.  After tracing, we drew the leaves free hand and painting them with fall colors. 

Let The Letter Adventure Begin!

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The seniors spent time this week working in their journals.  We set out a basket of sticks, which earlier in the week we had recognized as lines. We asked our seniors, "can you make the upper case letter A using these sticks?"   The children discovered that the letter A has 3 lines in it. We asked if they could draw The letter in their journals.  We bent pipe cleaners to make the lower case a as well. "It's like a circle with a line tail!"  We talked about the sound the letter A makes and everyone drew apples in their journals and wrote the word apple!  Next stop the letter B!

Lines

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Our circle conversation led us to lines. We looked for lines on our playground and found there was no shortage. Almost everywhere we looked there were lines. We even found lines that were made from shadows. Some of our friends wanted to trace the shadow lines made by our fence. The children also made lines using sidewalk chalk. They made, "short" and "long" lines, "straight" and "curvy" lines. They made every kind of line they could think of. In our studio we supplied black paper, rulers, and oil pastels. The children used the edge of the ruler to make straight lines. We talked about "horizontal", and "vertical" lines. We talked about the different shapes we can make with lines .  Our seniors traced lines in their journals and talked about how letters are made up of lines.