I wanted to share a few more pictures of some of the activities we did during October. The first activity was just too much fun. The children learned about gravity, stickiness, the concepts of up and down, and practiced problem solving when they were asked open-ended questions like "how can we get the skeletons up onto the ceiling?" and "how can we get the skeletons down from the ceiling?"
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| What is that on the ceiling of our classroom and how did it get there? How does it stay there? |
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| Oh, they are sticky skeletons! How do we get them down? |
The next activity used yet another pumpkin from our Daniels Farm field trip. The children strengthened their fine motor skills by hammering golf tees into the pumpkin. They had to increase their hand-eye cordination to successfully complete this task.
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| The big pumpkin and the hammers. |
Decorating pumpkins was a fun activity. We carved pumpkins. We colored on pumpkins with washable markers, wiped them off and colored on them some more. We put stickers on the pumpkins. But one of the most fun ways we decorated a pumpkin this year was by adding beads, wires and pipecleaners to the pumpkin. The children said the pumpkin looked like it had crazy hair. How was this learning? The children learned many different things during this activity. Some children sorted the beads by size, some by color, some patterned the beads on the wire (such as green, blue, green, blue) which are all math skills. Some children counted the number of beads they could fit onto the pipecleaners. Some children worked together, passing the bowls of beads back and forth to their friends, taking turns, helping each other find particular colors, shapes and sizes of beads (interpersonal, social and problem solving skills). Language skills, vocabulary and descriptive words were used abundantly during this activity. Fine moter skills were practiced when the children had to string very small beads onto the wires. The children were developing their appreciation for art by creating a three demensional sculpture.
The last activity I want to share with you in this post is an activity we used in the block area. We bought two packages of plastic cups. We placed them on the shelves with the blocks. The children attacked them! We built with them for a week solid. They had so much fun with them that we are going to leave them there for several more weeks. We are also going to explore with different styles, shapes, sizes and materials (such as paper cups and styrofoam cups) for building over the school year. The children first started building with the teachers, then they became confident and started building with each other and by themselves. They turned the cups over, built castles they could climb into and then found different ways to knock these structures down. Durning these activities the children learn about balance, structural support, shapes, team work, problem solving, thinking ahead, pre-planning, trying again if something doesn't work out as planned, hand-eye cordination, fine motor practice, concepts such as length, width, tall, short, big, small and long.
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| Here the children are exploring how to stack the cups in traditional and nontraditional ways. Some have stacked the cups one into another, some have stacked the cups by stacking the bottom of one cup on top of the bottom of another cup. They are learning to think in multiply demensions which is critical for higher level math. |
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| The children worked with the teachers and their classmates to create this tall tower. We learned that this shape is called a pyramid. It looks like a triangle. We also realized we could have made a pattern with the colors. |
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| This was the most fun part, knocking the whole thing down! CRASH! |
