One thing we like to do in Miss Carrie’s class is create environments.
We do this with a variety of materials to make these activities fun and stimulating.
For this activity, we created savannahs out of play dough and yellow pipe cleaners.
Students then added an animal to their savannahs and created different scenarios with their friends!
Sorting and classifying are basic skills taught to children as part of preschool and kindergarten math programs. These activities require children to organize items into groups based on a common characteristic such as size, color, shape, texture, or flavor and also explain why they grouped the items as they did.
Sorting and classifying are skills that a child will use in all areas of his life at home and in school as he puts away toys, organizes clothes, arranges a locker or empties the dishwasher, for example. Children first learn how to sort items.
For example, a young child can likely separate a group of plastic figurines into two groups (vehicles and animals, perhaps) before he is able to state the distinction that cars have wheels and animals are living things. As children gain comfort sorting, they are encouraged to explain their thought process in sorting by identifying and naming the characteristic that determines the groups.
Recognizing groups of objects requires logical thinking, an ability that will be important as your child makes other decisions. Also, understanding the relationship between the different groups and being able to discuss that relationship hones analytical skills. For this activity, we practiced sorting elephants by size. We placed large elephants at the top of the tray and decreased in size as we went down.
Under natural conditions, elephants eat mostly grass, tree leaves, flowers, wild fruits, twigs, shrubs, bamboo, and bananas.
Their main food is grass when it’s available, along with some leaves. But if the weather turns dry and grass dies back, they will eat almost any kind of vegetation they can find.
They will knock down trees to eat their foliage. They will even turn to bark and the woody parts of plants. Also elephants use their tusks to dig for roots.
Much of this coarse food passes through their system without being thoroughly digested. They also use their tusks to dig for water, making it available not only to themselves, but also to other types of animals.
To demonstrate this phenomena, we fed our very own elephants! Using tweezers, students placed leaves into the mouths of their elephants. This accessed both fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination!
From birth through to early childhood, children use their senses to explore and try to make sense of the world around them.
They do this by touching, tasting, smelling, seeing, moving and hearing.
Sensory activities also play a key role in the maturation process of young children.
Activities that require manipulation and touch enable children to heighten the adaptive response tthey playedhrough their senses. They are an integral component in early childhood education.
They not only engage the child, but stimulate cognitive development. To access this, your young one participated in an activity where they played with you elephants on “savannahs” made out of pasta, rice, and beans. Students enjoyed creating stories with their friends, engaging with their senses while doing so!
Very early writing is indicative of unconscious, or implicit knowledge of writing conventions.
As children’s knowledge of writing develops, their implicit knowledge gradually becomes more explicit knowledge that they learn to use to communicate meaning.
The more children interact with print in various forms, the more likely they will develop explicit knowledge and awareness of writing conventions. It is for this reason that we are always using creative ways to practice our writing. From tracing letters in sand, to writing them in pencil, we enjoy literacy!
For this activity, we discussed the different shapes that form letters. We learned that some of these shapes are round, some are pointy and some are jagged. Using tweezers and pom poms, we created a letter L. They then traced Ls in sand. Lastly, we learned how to write an L with large pencils!
Your little ones love to explore with the many science activities that we do throughout the week.
These activities not only engage your child, but explain the physical properties of objects, teach cause and effect, and provide the necessary hands-on experience most conducive to learnng.
For this activity, w used alka seltzer tablets and film canisters to make rockets.
To do this, we mixed the ingredients, and poured them into film canisters.
These film canisters were decorated like rockets.
Upon mixing the ingredients, we squealed as we watched our rockets soar to the sky!
Sensory Play includes any activity that stimulates your young child’s senses: touch, smell, taste, movement, balance, sight and hearing.
Sensory activities facilitate exploration and naturally encourage children to use scientific processes while they play, create, investigate and explore.
The sensory activities allow children to refine their thresholds for different sensory information helping their brain to create stronger connections to process and respond to sensory information.
As part of our Planet’s week, we decided to create the surface of Mars.
With some pasta, red sand, and kidney beans, we learned about the composition of the soil on Mars, and then we made it!
Scientists have long thought that massive planets like Neptune and Uranus which contain relatively tiny rocky cores covered with a mantle of slurried water, ammonia, and methane ices and surrounded by a thick atmosphere—are subject to rain made with literal diamonds.
Now researchers have synthesized the process in a lab, showing how such conditions might occur. Their results support this idea.
To recreate this process in our class, we created our very own Neptune s with glass beads and play dough. In our classroom, we love to play with play dough because it has so many developmental benefits!
For one, improves fine motor skills as students manipulate the dough. Secondly, it encourages divergent thinking as students build their own creations. Lastly, it builds creativity, as students use their imaginations!
Dark, cold and whipped by supersonic winds, ice giant Neptune is the eighth and most distant planet in our solar system.
More than 30 times as far from the Sun as Earth, Neptune is the only planet in our solar system not visible to the naked eye. Neptune’s atmosphere is made from about 80 percent hydrogen and 19 percent helium.
It also contains a small amount water and methane, which give rise to the green-bluish color. The dark blue and bright white features of the atmosphere help distinguish Neptune from Uranus.
The thin cirrus-like white clouds contain methane ice. When hydrocarbon snowflakes form in Neptune’s atmosphere they melt before reaching the surface because of the high pressure. The fastest winds in the Solar System blow on Neptune.
With speeds of about 1,240 mph, they are five times faster than the strongest winds on Earth! To help your little ones understand the vast gases of Neptune, we created our very own!
Using baking soda and lotion as our play dough, we constructed spheres that resembled the planet. We then used eye droppers to add vinegar to the dough, laughing as we watched.
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