Chalkydoodles

Found this website when it came up on my Living Social alert. I love some of the child friendly items and their philosophy on upcycled and recycled materials to make their items. Their blog is a good read too! Check it out. I copied a little bit of their information and placed it below the link. Hope you like it.

Chalkydoodles website link


http://www.chalkydoodles.com/blog/ blog link

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The blue tornado experiment and video

Ms. Sarah found a way to make a tornado by using milk (which we added a few drops of blue food coloring to for this video) and water.  You can recreate this experiment at home by following the steps illustrated by Ms. Sarah in this video.  She used one of the droppers you use to give medicine to an infant or toddler.  It is very easy and as you can tell by the children's reactions, very exciting.  This experiment causes the children to use the process of scientific reasoning to figure out how the tornado works.  Vocabulary used after this experiment was done included words like vortex, circular, uplift, swirling and spinning.  The children also expanded on the activity by trying to recreate the experiment by placing the milk at the top of the container to see if the results would be the same.  They made their hypothesis and tested them.  The children were also encouraged to do this experiment without the teachers help to see if they could recreate the results.  The act of squeezing the bulb, controlling the flow of milk and placing the milk carefully at the bottom of the container took a large amount of concentration and fine motor control.  The children also had to wait patiently for their turn and negotiate who would be first and if they would work together.  And they thought they were just playing in milk and water!  Enjoy the video and let us know how the experiment works at your home.  Take your own video and send it to us.  If you don't video your child's face we will post it on our classroom blog.



No Words Needed

Connecting to past learning - from dinosaurs to glaciers

 Earlier this year we did a unit on Dinosaurs (go back through our blog to refresh your memory on paleontology).  During the second semester we are connecting what we are learning now to what we learned earlier this year.  One example is our unit on icebergs and glaciers.  The children created their own glaciers and icebergs out of the abundance of snow  during the January snowstorms.  During the process of freezing and melting the snow each day some of the animals they were playing with in the sensory table became frozen in the iceberg.  Some of the children made the connection to the dinosaur unit back in November in the following way.  Dinosaur bones became trapped in rocks.  The Arctic animals they were playing with became trapped in the ice in the sensory table.  People who tried to get bones out of the ground or ice are called archaeologist.  The children remembered that they were being archaeologist when they started digging the play animals out of the ice in the sensory table.

 They connected their current play to their past play.  This is called LEARNING!  And this critical type of learning cannot be achieved without hands-on, child-directed play. 

You will see more and more play experiences during the second semester that connects current play to past play creating more concrete and long term learning.

These children are excavating, using their tools, chiseling through the frozen ice trying to free the frozen animals from the glaciers.  The students are developing fine motor skills, strengthening their hands for proper grip on writing utensils,  working together as a team to remove the ice, problem solving  how to remove the hard ice without using warm water, how to negotiate space and take turns, using their vocabulary, and most importantly, using their past knowledge learned during our dinosaur unit and applying that knowledge to thier current play in the sensory table.

What animals are frozen in the icy waters?  Which ones are mammals?  Do they get cold?  Why?  Why not?  What keeps animals from getting cold in the icy water?  Make sure you ask good open-ended questions and not just yes and no questions.  You might be amazed what the children will teach you!



Now the children wanted to create their own glaciers and icebergs.  Needless to say, Ms. Sarah, Ms. Nancy and Ms. Carole Dawn spent a lot of time bringing in snow from outside so our young scientists/meteorologists could create their own glacier.  Some of the students even created their own land masses.  Maybe we will have to teach the children about places like Iceland and Greenland and put up maps that show cold places like Antartica.



These students created several glaciers and noticed that rivers formed between them.  Next they wanted to create boats to navigate between the glaciers.  With this activity the students showed an interest and an acuity toward understanding land formations, waterways and how people travel by land and water.  This is one of the most critical ways we find out what the children are interested in and how we can create activities that spark their imaginations.

icebergs and glaciers

These pictures are not in chronological order because this activity lasted for several days and morphed as the snow fell and the freezing temperatures helped the snow and ice refreeze the ice and water each night when we put the sensory table back outside at the end of each school day.  This activity can be done at home by putting snow into a dish pan or bucket and letting your child play.  When the snow starts to melt put the bucket back outside overnight.  In the morning fill the bucket back up with snow.  Dump the bucket of snow and compacted snow/ice from the day before into a bigger bucket and let your child continue to play.  Repeat this process for as long as you like.  Each time the snow freezes, melts, refreezes and you add more to the refrozen ice pack more layers are added to your homemade iceberg.  You can also cut the iceberg in a half and use a magnifying glass and let your child view the different layers of ice.  You can also add a small amount of food coloring to the water before setting it out to refreeze to show the different layers of water freezing and layering.  The children were very interested in this activity and it lasted for almost two weeks.

We added Arctic animals and Native American people to our ice pack for dramatic play and nature science.

In the background we placed pictures of glaciers in the ocean so the children could see that only a small part of a glacier can be seen above the water and the majority of the glacier sits below the water where it is hidden.

The children started to create craters and caves as we began to let the iceberg melt during the day and refreeze outside at night.  We would add more snow in the morning when we brought the sensory table back inside when school started.

The children stated to create habitats for the animals around day 3 of the experiment.  We started talking about hibernation, why some animals do not freeze in such cold environments and that even though polar bears have white fur they actually have black skin.



Each day the iceberg takes on a new shape depending on how much snow the children add on to the base and how much melting and refreezing has happened the night before.  The children has also started to add some blue coloring to the melted water before they set the sensory table out at night to refreeze.  They noticed that in the pictures of the glaciers hung up by the sensory table the glaciers seemed to have blue layers and they wanted to create that in their glacier so they started to add blue water to their iceberg.  They are enjoying the results.



Exploring the ice world!



I have to admit this is my favorite picture.  It looks like snow art.  As much as I am looking forward to spring, birds, flowers and green on the trees again, this picture reminds me of a winter wonderland.  This picture is also a great seek and find activity if you print it and ask your child to point out the different animals.  Try it.

POLAR BEAR!

Education for the Real World | BrainWorld

If I could beg, plead, mandate, or force each of the parents of every child I have ever taught or ever will teach to read just one thing about how their child's brain actually learns this would be the article.

Theses are scary time for education. 100 teachers and administrators laid off. Huge budget shortfalls for states leading to unimaginable cuts in early childhood, elementary, secondary and special education. Larger classrooms. Smaller budgets for education. Fewer resources for special education. It is critical for parents to know how their child's brain learns, what the latest research shows is best practice for education and how to advocate for the best possible education in these financially tight times.

It is also more important than ever that parents take their role as their children's first and most important educators seriously and support their child's education at home. I think this magazine does a great job of putting education and brain research into plain, enjoyable and easy a to understand language for parents and educators to understand. It also has many practical ideas to use with your children both in the classroom and at home.

PLEASE read this small article and come and talk to me about it, email me a short little message about what you thought about the message or just drop me a note about what you learned or tried at home. Educating your child is a team effort, we do this together, in tandem. It is dance. We take turns leading and following with your child. The old African proverb "It takes a village to raise a child" is very true and very much alive in our classroom philosophy. Email me at cdleading@yahoo.com when you read this. I am looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Enjoy your long weekend. Do something fun with your child. Below is the direct link to the article. Just click on it and away you go!

Education for the Real World BrainWorld

Storm Fest - Free Event To Learn About St. Louis Weather - KTVI

Storm Fest - Free Event To Learn About St. Louis Weather - KTVI

As we continue with our unit on science many of our students are showing a great interest in weather. I found this great event I think several of our students would really enjoy. Click this link to learn more about Storm Fest, a free event to learn more about weather. We have been learning about tornado's, flooding, snow and ice so the students have been exposed and show a great interest in the subject of weather. This would be a great day out with the family, a wonderful way to enhance their natural interest in this topic, a fun free way to spend time together and a great hands on way to !

Science Flash Cards | Have Fun Teaching

Science Flash Cards Have Fun Teaching
Just wanted to share a link that I found to a site that has some weather related vocabulary cards that can be printed and used at home to support our science unit. We will be printing these at school and using these in our science center and at circle time to expand vocabulary and explore new science concepts. I hope the new links I post will give you some new tools to use at home with your child(ren). There are many sets of vocabulary cards at this site that you can print and use at home as journal starters, story starters, print two sets for matching games, make a beginning letter sound game, hide the cards and do a seek and find game or play a memory game with the cards. Let us know how you use these cards at home!

A winter' walk

We try to let the children experience art in many different forms.  One of the forms they love is photography.  They have their own digital camera that was donated to the class last year by Leah's mom and dad.  They use the camera all the time.  After the first snow storm in January we took the children on a nature walk with the camera.  We encouraged them to look around very carefully and take pictures of anything that captured their attention.  Visual discrimination is a very important skill for reading and writing.  This is one of the reasons taking away art education in school programs is so detrimental to children's learning.  Children that have to opportunity to experience the world in many different ways, not just by reading about it or listening to a teacher lecture, have greater recall and process information into their long term memory better and more efficiently.  Children who have more hands-on experience and have multiple opportunities for those experiences make more neural connections in the brain which in turn makes learning new information easier.  This is why we do nature walks often and we have the children document these walks through photography, journaling and story telling.  This are critical components to reaching back into their memories and pulling out previous information. Children at this age learn best through imitation and repetition, so by role modeling and providing lots of opportunities to repeat activities your child has the best chance of creating long term neural pathways in the brain that create "highways" for future learning.  Enjoy the pictures.  Some where taking by the children and some where taken by me when the children pointed out an object they found interesting.  I encourage you to repeat this activity at home several times over the seasons.  The recent ice and snow will create some wonderful opportunities to capture fantastic ice pictures.

 

Building Snowball

For the past several weeks the AM and PM class have been working on a collaborative group project.  The children wanted to build a snowman "as big as the ceiling".   Well, the ladder would only allow us to build the snowman safely a little over halfway to the ceiling but the children seemed happy enough with that.  The children, under Ms. Nancy's guidance, came up with a plan on how to create this giant snowman.  They wanted to make it out of boxes.  They were asked how to make the boxes tall enough, how to keep them from falling and how to cover the boxes so they looked like a snowman.  Ms. Nancy wrote down all of there answers and made a list for the children.  We then made a donation list for the parents and went to Ms. Rita, the school cook and asked her to save boxes for us.  The parents (you wonderful group of people) started bringing in toilet paper and other materials on the children's list and the building/construction on Snowball began.  This process from start to finish took about three weeks.
As you can tell the children had to work together to stack the boxes.  The needed a ladder to make the boxes taller.  Ms. Nancy took the opportunity to talk to them about Paws Laws and being safe when on a ladder, taking turns (being kind) and holding the ladder for friends (being responsible).  Each child got a turn on the ladder if they wanted it.  The children then had to make sure the boxes would not fall over.  They wanted to tape the boxes together.  They also talked about glueing the boxes but thought tape might work better.  You can also see that the boxes were stacked from biggest to smallest.  Concepts of size, number, stability (basic physics), teamwork, planning, decision making and problem solving were all part of the early stages of this project.  Interest in the early part of the project sometimes took a back seat to the newly fallen snow and for days the boxes sat alone and abandoned.  The nice thing about working with the project approach is that the children are not on a time line to finish a project and can return to it when the interest reemerges.

The next stage of the project involved covering the boxes with something to make it look like a basic snowman.  The children talked about painting the boxes.  They also talked about paper mache, but due to wheat allergies in the classroom that was not an option.  Ms. Nancy told them about using watered down glue and shredded recycled paper.  Using recycled paper was a good way to be kind to the environment and take care of the planet.  The children started with paper mache and them moved on to using toilet paper to wrap around the boxes.  They also used some leftover cotton batting we had left over from a holiday craft we did.  They were really good at wanting to use left over materials and wanted to recycle things that had been used in previous projects so they could Be Kind and Be Responsible.  We really do try to reinforce Paws Laws in all of our lesson plans and in our daily interactions with the children.  We hope you are still using the phrases Be Safe, Be Kind, and Be Responsible at home.


In previous posts you have seen that we have been reading the book Snowballs.  The children made the connection between that book and the snowman they were building.  We had been talking about the kind of art used to make the pictures in the book.  The type of art in the book is called collage (many of the children remember this and if you ask them at home they will tell you what collage is).  They wanted to use the collage technique to decorate their snowman.  They also wanted to use as many recycled items from around the classroom and from past projects as possible.  We undecorated the holiday tree and used many of those items when decorating the snowman.




The children wanted to use the book as a reference while creating their snowman.  They were referring back to the book for information.  This is exactly how research is done.  The children are developing the skills needed for researching for writing papers and reports in their elementary, secondary and collage careers.  This skill will follow them into their professional careers as well.  It was amazing to see them make this connection that they could use a book they were reading as a tool to help them create something new.  Bravo!

These two children work together to create Snowballs face.  One child added eyeglasses to the snowman because he had eyeglasses.  It was very interesting watching how the children made their decisions on how Snowball was going to be decorated, what materials were going to be used to create each feature and who was going to embellish what part of the snowman.  Sometimes two friends would want to do the same thing at the same time and we would stand back and watch them use their problem solving and social language skills to work through the problem.  Only a few times did the teachers have to step in and guide the children through a particularly difficult conversation.

The children used a variety of collage materials to create different body parts for Snowball.  Here they are using crinkle paper and plastic gloves to makes hands.

The AM class decorated on side of Snowball and the PM class decorated the opposite side of Snowball.  Here you can see the AM side of Snowball.  They said they thought their side kind of looked like Spot in the book Snowballs because Spot the Dog snowman had lots of buttons and their snowman had lots of round spots on him.

Here is the PM side of Snowball.  He has glasses and hands that can hold a cup of hot chocolate.  He is also decorated with lots of snowflakes and beads. 

The Family Fun Fair was held last weekend and the book fair was open.  The classrooms were asked to bring down a display if they had one based on a favorite book.  We were not planning on having a display but the children just happened to come up with this project on their own.  We had to find a way to get Snowball down to the book fair.  The children thought that moving him in a wagon would be the safest way to get him all the way down to the other part of the building.  They had to use teamwork to get Snowball safely through the doorways and down the ramp way to Conference Room C.  The children did a great job working together to get Snowball safely to his destination.

Here is Snowball, safely sitting outside the book fair.  There was a contest for the best display.  Families that attended the Family Fun Fair last Saturday voted and Snowball created by the AM and PM children in room 411 won.  They will have a new train table and trains to play with in their classroom next week.  they will pass it on to other classrooms when they are done playing with it, but it was a nice honor to know that their creativity, teamwork and love of reading and art helped them to create a snowman that brought happiness to all that see him (and to know that he will not melt even when the sun finally does come out!).