December Activities

Seeing how it is now officially spring, I think I can now start posting some of the activities we did in our class in December?  

Le Sigh.

Pine cone Christmas trees.

We used up our old cinnamon play dough to fill in the pots.

Then children picked out a pine cone and decorated it with glitter glue, jewels, and baubles.

Snow Creatures.  

These were made using 1 part shaving cream to 1 part glue.

After the children made and decorated their snow creatures, they named them.

Snow creatures out of play dough with different materials.

Salt Douple People.

  

After baking these, children were invited to paint them with water colors.

Coffee Filter Snow Flakes. 

This activity also doubled as an assessment on cutting.  Many of our art activities are also used as assessments.

Raccoon ornaments.

I wish I had time to post all the activities we did over the holiday, especially circle time explorations, Diwali, and Hanukkah. I take lots of pictures of other activities, but the few I post here are ones taking with my iPhone and not the school camera, and don't they include faces.

Apples

Fall is in th air, and although you would never know it here in Tucson, we are talking all about it in our classroom.  We started by doing a unit on apples, which we will continue throughout the week.  Here are some things and a riddle we worked on today.

In circle we noticed differences and similarities in apples and used them for math.

We painted with warm colors.

We did Apple Math in a small group activity.

And painting with apples.

We also taught the children this riddle about an apple:

Experimenting with Watercolor Drops in Water

The key to this is getting the children to only use small drops of water at a time.  As you can guess this can be very challenging for some children.  But if they are able to put the watercolor into the water just drops at a time, it can be quite mesmerizing and beautiful.  Some children didn't want to leave and spent their whole classroom free time at this table.