How does your garden grow?

Spring is officially here and with that came another great Star of the Week presentation and lots and lots of eggs!  We talked about flowers, plants and all the eggs and new spring babies that are going to be appearing this time of year.  

For our pre-reading activity this week we did a lot of letter matching of capital and lower case letters on the halves of eggs together to build the egg showing both versions of A and a.

Bringing out the eggs this week set up a lot of excitement for the children as some of them talked about the egg hunts they enjoy doing this time of year and all the treats they like to find inside their eggs.

After a lot of egg activity, we took a break to plant our own gardens with Styrofoam bowls and pipe cleaners for stems.  Some children decorated the tops of the stems with tissue paper for flower petals and others wanted to just have plant stems in their gardens and decorated the base of their garden bowl.

We learned that bugs need to help us in our garden to get the flowers to grow.  We created caterpillars by adding beads to pipe cleaners and either making our caterpillars very colorful or patterned or one solid color.

After making caterpillars for our gardens we planted more flowers with strips of paper for stems and paper plates for the top of the flowers.  Some children chose to cut petals into the plate and some colored them while others glued all kinds of additional extra items to the flower tops.  We then 'planted' the flowers around the room to add to a variety of butterfly paintings to make our classroom ready for springtime.

 We had a lot of energy now with the weather changing to the warmer side so we sang a few springtime songs and danced a few springtime dances.  We made it rain in a storm this week with rhythm sticks and even just used our hands and feet to make sounds of thunder and rain as well during lots of circle time games and musical activities this week too.

We made more butterflies to hang from our ceiling out of coffee filters that we colored with markers then squirted with water to make a ty-dye color affect on the coffee filters.  Then, we sang a few more songs while they dried then went back to the tables to attach pipe cleaners for the body of the butterfly and hung them around our room with our flowers and egg baskets.  Some of the children asked to take their butterflies home but most of them are currently hanging in our rooms. 

 We made it rain inside jars this week a few times as a class as well as individually when the teachers added shaving cream to the top of water in a jar then dropped water color paint on top of the shaving cream 'filling' the cloud with 'moisture' to wait for it to 'rain' inside the jar.  This is one of our favorite science experiments to do and always an amazing thing to watch.

We read a lot of books about spring time, eggs, caterpillars, bugs, plants, flowers and gardens this week to learn more and build our vocabulary on this topic.  The books we have accessible to the children in the room change with the themes and many of them grabbed some of these books during free time this week to read over and over again.

We built a rainbow on Friday after talking about what happens in the sky after it rains by lining up cups of baking soda and water color paint to practice learning the colors and order of colors in a rainbow.  Then, the teachers poured vinegar over the cups to allow the foaming rainbow to appear. 

After making rainbows we worked on patterns with various spring related images like frogs, flowers, ducks, clouds, plants, etc.  The children working on cutting out the paper pieces at the bottom of a page and then worked to glue them in the correct blanks to complete the pattern lines.  Many of the children are doing amazing with their cutting and have shown terrific growth in this skill!  

 We made caterpillars using stickers as well as finger stamp marks this week too in our math activities where the children needed to add 2 stickers or stamps if their caterpillar said number 2 and 8 if it said 8, etc. 

Before heading home on Friday we went outside to burn off more energy and enjoy some Vitamin D with the sunshine.  We went on an egg hunt and were able to take home the eggs and stickers inside! 

What's Coming Up?

This week is SPRING BREAK!  We will resume school again Monday, April 2nd for career week.

Don't forget that Preschool Graduation is Wednesday, May 16th this year.  More details will follow as it gets closer.