FALL and "E" Week!

Our school is located in central Alabama so that means we don't get to see much ice and snow in the winter. But autumn more than makes up for it. We have studied autumn for two weeks now and I personally think we could have continued our discussions for at least another week. The children have really enjoyed looking at the leaves and seeing all the different colors. We actually found a PINK leaf! You should have seen the faces of the girls! WOW! Now of course the boys are on a hunt for the blue leaf!

While my husband and I were working last weekend at the lake I came across some amazing items that I bagged up and brought to school. I think they made the interesting leaf people. I don't really think there is much to say about this art work except meet the 2010 leaf people . . . .

Don't you just love her hair bow????
The boys of course added buttons!

If you closely you will see the faces were made from tree bark! Oh, a very special thank you to my partner in crime, Mrs. Christi! She found the amazing arms for us. They are actually the dried out stems of her day lilies! LOOK, they look exactly like hands!

We also have a class pet! He is a caterpillar that we have named "Creek". (A little background on the name. I decided that since caterpillar begin with the letter "C", his/her name should start with "C" too. After several minutes of listening the to the "C" sound the children started coming up with names. Soon "Creek" popped out of Isaiah! That was it, everyone loved it!)

We put fresh leaves in his little house each day and we are patiently (?) waiting for him to start spinning his cocoon.

This week we also did a pretty amazing "E" experiment. I call it "Can we get an egg into a bottle?" Really good instructions are found here - http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/kitchenscience/exp/sucking-an-egg-into-a-bottle/

Yep, that's me! Lighting a small strip of paper towel for the experiment!



The children, and a few teachers, really loved it. It is very simple and FUN!
Next week is all about Community Helpers and the letter "F"!!!!

"D" Week and Fall Theme

Been way to busy lately so this post is once again late, sorry. This week ended up being too short. Fun but way too short. We are our of school on friday for what the public school were calling "Fall Break". WHATEVER! I headed to the lake for a little R&R with hubby.

For our "Fall" activity this week I copied a wonderful idea from
http://1plus1plus1equals1.blogspot.com/2010/09/something-special-fall-tree-craft.html I altered it a little. Here is our take on it.

Start with a paper towel tube. I cut the bottom and stapled it to a piece of cardboard (okay, it was really the back of a cereal box). Paint it brown. Let it dry. Split the top and fan it out.
Add leaves! On her site Carisa made this with her own children and used fake leaves she bought at the store. Well, since I have an entire class I decided to use real leaves. Hope you like this!Since we were out of school on friday we didn't have a cooking session :(
Next week though, next week!

Fall Leaf Man

I just had to go ahead and post what I think is the cheapest and cutest fall project. Here he is (or in some cases "she"). I call him "Leaf Man".
I will confess that it takes a lot of glue but he is well worth it. He is made from leaves and sticks from my backyard. Everyone gets to pick out their own leaves, acorns and sticks. I even have pine straw for his hair.

Another great project is our squishy leaves. Everyone gets to pick out several different colors of paint and blop them on the cut out leaf. (I find that using poster board is best.) Then we cover the leaf with clear plastic wrap and squish it! I love the look on their faces when they see their leaf once the plastic wrap is removed. It is truly a work of art. Here are a couple from last year.
Here are the leaves displayed on the wall.

Thanks for stopping by. I hope you will try one or both of these great projects!

Birthday Calendar

I have a very hard time each year trying to make a cute display for our birthdays. I know there are all those charts that you can buy. They are very cute, but just not me. This year I think I finally made one that I will use again.

I found the elephant on-line and enlarged him on the copier. I think next time I will make the ballon on plain paper and mount then on black cardstock. This way they will "pop" a bit.

"C", Triangle and Yellow Week

"B" week was going to be hard to follow. But, I think we did a great job trying! This week it is all about the letter "C", the color yellow, triangles and the number 3! Oh, and don't forget our topic of the week - transportation. WOW, that is a lot to squeeze into one week.


Let's start out with Mrs. Karen's surprise! I found my son's old catching gear and brought it to school. It was still a little stinky, but no one seemed to care!


One of our fun projects this week was a cool looking car. Check it out and please notice that we used all of the shapes and colors that we studied, red circles, blue squares and yellow triangles!
Our special snack this week was a wonderful car cookie! I guess we could have just bought some cookie dough and cut a car shape but that's just not us. We made our from graham crackers, round vanilla wafers and yellow icing. They were a big hit!


Our two science experiments this week were a lot of fun. The first was ISO/THIXOTROPY. huh? Corn starch and water! :)

Here are my instructions -

Procedure: Place about a cup of cornstarch (aka corn flour) in a large bowl and add about a ¼ cup of water to the cornstarch. Keep adding water until the mixture appears somewhat thicker than pancake batter. With your hands, take a handful and knead the mixture, like you would bread dough. As the mixture is agitated or squeezed, it will become firm as long as continuous kneading or pressure is exerted. As soon as the pressure stops, the ‘batter’ will revert to its original form and ‘pour’ through your fingers. Even though the cornstarch and water is a liquid, you can form the stuff into a ball if you can squeeze and knead it quickly enough. The sensation of this in the hands is unique and must be experienced to be believed. It feels great!

What’s going on? This experiment demonstrates iso- and thixo-tropy properties of certain emulsions (fluid mixtures).
Isotropy is the property of a fluid to become firm when agitated. This is what you’re experiencing with the cornstarch and water. You can also see this while walking on wet sand at a beach. The sand firms up below your feet as you first touch the sand and then becomes more fluid, as your feet sink into the sand, just a moment later. If you run over the sand, the sand will feel very firm. If you walk slowly, your feet will sink below the surface with every step.
Thixotropy is the opposite of isotropy in that the fluid mixture becomes more fluid (less firm) as it is agitated. An example of this is where you strike the end of a ketchup bottle to get ketchup to come out of the bottle. The striking force temporarily causes the ketchup become ‘runny’ and it flows more easily from the bottle (and on to your new clothes - white ones). Another example is the infamous “quicksand”. If you thrash around in the quicksand, you will sink “quicker” because all that wiggling causes the sand to liquefy.

Mess Factor - Cornstarch is an edible, non-staining, harmless substance (probably one of the cheapest food stuffs you can buy), but this experiment tends to get cornstarch on clothing and the floor. The other thing about this experiment is that once you’ve put your hands into the cornstarch & water mixture (aka ‘glop’), you won’t want to take your hands out. It is quite a unique experience!

Things to Remember - Isotropic = cornstarch & water or beach sand Thixotropic = ketchup or “quicksand” [think of ‘thick ketchup’ for Thixo]

Think this is too hard for a group of three year olds? Think again, they loved it and tried to say every word!

The next experiment was just as simple but it had a WOW factor that even shocked me! I call it the Colorful Mixtures Science Experiment

What You Need:
Milk
Food coloring
Liquid dish soap
Dish- wide rim
What To Do:
1) Pour milk into a wide rimmed dish, and let sit until it warms to room temperature (THIS IS A VERY IMPORTANT STEP, the milk must be room temperature!)
2) Place drops of different food coloring in the milk
3) Place two drops of liquid dish soap into the mixture

Now stand back and watch!
Sorry there are no pictures, it is hard to coordinate photos with mess! :)
It was a great week! Next week we will be reviewing our shapes, colors and numbers while we study the letter "D" and talk about autumn! I can't wait!

"B", Blue and Squares Week

Last weekend was spent seeing my sweet son and Bill's family reunion, so there was blog time! So let's catch up!

"B" week is my all time favorite week. I know I say that all the time, but I mean it this time ;) There are so many wonderful ways to explore the letter "B". Let's start with some of our amazing art . . . .

Here we are spooning on big blobs of blue paint! Next we covered it is clear plastic wrap and rolled over it with a BOWING PIN! Yes, I was lucky enough to get my fat little hands on a real bowling pin! The children could not believe how heavy it was. They loved it!

Early in the week we made Square Sally and Square Sam. Everyone loved seeing and all the squares!

Everyone knows you can't have "B" week with a bumble bee! Here is ours

Yes, I know the bee's stinger goes on the back of the bee, but my students wanted his stinger on his nose. It is their art work after all!

One of my favorites this week was our "Butter Bean Blue Square". I drew out a large square on a piece of blue construction paper and then the children used blue glue to glue down butter beans. (the blue glue is made by simply putting blue paint in the bottom of a cup and adding glue. Then let the children stir. I love watching their faces when the glue changes color!

This was a very simple and inexpensive craft. But it allowed the children to use their fine-motor skills, which I think is very important.

Next was snack time! We ate a bowling alley of course! We used a graham cracker for the base and carefully added the marshmellow "pins".
AND the bowling ball was chocolate malted milk ball! YUMMY FUN!

Next thing you know we headed outside for a little baseball painting! Being the Mom of a former baseball player, I just HAD to find a way to use some baseballs for "B" week, so we headed outside! Here are our baseballs soaking up some lovely blue paint!

We used three different colors of blue paint! My "partner-in-crime", Mrs. Christi, patiently put disposable gloves on each child and then we rolled the baseball onto a large piece of blue butcher paper.

(Sorry for the bad picture, we were rolling on our carpool area and it is covered.) A little note for anyone wanting to do this - try to NOT do this on a windy day! We had to tape the paper down. The paper turned out so pretty that we have decided to use it for a special background during our end of the year art show!
We had one more surprise left - bottle bowling! I sent an e-mail out to my fellow teachers the weekend before asking everyone to bring in their empty 2-liter bottles. WOW, we got a bunch! So we went bowling!

One of things that truly surprised me during this activity was how everyone cheered and congratulated each other. It didn't matter if someone knocked down 1 bottle or 9 bottles, everyone yelled and high-fived each other. GOOD SPORTSMANSHIP!

"B" week was wonderful! I hated to see it end. But after "B" comes "C" hmmmmmm wonder what we will do. . . . . . .

"A" Week

We FINALLY started working on our alphabets this week at school. Two weeks are really a long time for us to have to ssstttrrrreeeettttcccchhhh. But, it was better than then usual 3 or 4 weeks. This week we started studying the letter "A", circles, red and the number 1. To some it seems like a lot to put into 7 short days. We manage by incorporating the color and shape. For some reason the words "ants" and "apple" got everybodies attention, so I ran with it. First we glued ants onto a large "A". I didn't think that would be very much fun, but the children had great fun with the giant ants. We also ate some ants! Actually the were raisins (wheew!) that the students stuck on top of their iced oatmeal cookies. Oh, and the oatmeal cookies were CIRCLES of course.

We also made "Annie the Apple" and "Adam the Apple". I really think this class loves glue! It makes them so happy.

But the most fun day this week was friday. We headed to the kitchen and made apple scented playdough. It looked like plain, old white dough but it smell delicious! Here is the recipe:

Ingredients:
1 cup flour
1/2 cup salt (use iodized, not kosher for smoother dough)
1 Tablespoon olive oil
1 Tablespoon cream of tartar
1 cup water
Red food coloring (I use the Wilton gel colors)
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon ground allspice
1/8 teaspoon ground cardamom
Stir ingredients together well in pot. Over medium heat cook the dough, stirring constantly until it forms a ball. Turn dough onto a board (or the countertop) and knead until very smooth. Cool. Store in a covered plastic container.

Very simple to make and the children loved it. One parent actually e-mailed me to make sure it WAS playdough. She said it smelled too good and she wanted to bake it! What fun we had!

Of course playdough would not be fun without the snake!

Next week "B" week, my favorite!