Jelly Beans & Playdoh - Easter Leftovers

This year, after Easter, I somehow ended up with several bags of extra jelly beans ... I obviously thought I hadn't purchased them more than once! What's one to do with so many leftover sweets... ?

We played with them of course!

First, I put a bunch of big & little jelly beans in a tray with some toothpicks. I showed my 3 1/2 year old how to push the toothpicks into the jelly beans and connect them to make shapes. This was pretty difficult for him to accomplish & he poked his little fingers more than a few times. However, he was very interested & motivated to figure it out. He did eventually figure it out -- with close supervision, there were no major injuries and plenty of fine motor practice & early engineering going on...

A few days later, we added a bowl of jelly beans to some homemade Kool-Aid play dough... and made lots of interesting foods...

Here are a few of our creations...

The jelly bean color same off on our play dough as we played & the whole activity was sticky, but yummy smelling & tons of fun!

Exploring Melting...

In class today, we read an old Scholastic reader - from January of last year! The kids usually enjoy reading the 'newspaper' and I love the great photos & easy to understand text....It's perfect for my students!

Today, we used it as an introduction to the concepts: frozen & melting - which the kids have had lots of experience with lately -- with all the wintery mixed-up weather that we've been having!

On the back, there was an activity where the kids were supposed to identify which items were 'frozen' and which items were 'melting.'

They had so much trouble showing that they understood the difference between the two, that we just had to do our own experiment to better understand what frozen & melting really meant!

We went outside & collected bags of snow. Once back inside, the kids came up with places to put the bags of snow - after some prodding & suggestions they came up with the fridge, freezer, next the heater & on the window.

To add another twist, we added some other ingredients to three of the bags: salt, hand sanitizer & flour.

We checked on the baggies several times over the next 2-3 hours & the kids were very excited to find that some of their snow had turned into water - it had melted. We took pictures of our observations to make into a book...

Some of my students were also able to figure out what ingredients made the snow melt faster - the bag with the salt even had 'frost' that formed on the outside of the bag (a neat little chemical reaction to make observations about!)

We ended out the day by reviewing the pictures that we took, discussing our observations & creating a little book about the melting snow!

 

At snack time, we read The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats - and the kids knew exactly what was going to happen to the snowball that Peter put into his pocket ... it MELTED!

Hopefully tomorrow, when I ask them about 'melting,' they remember our experiment and can easily differentiate between 'melting' & 'frozen.'

Bugs, Birds & Frogs...

It's been a long time since my last post! Balancing work, family and all the other things has been too much lately. Here's a recap of what' we've been doing in preschool over the last 6 weeks or so!

We started with a month long focus on birds... the kids loved this topic and constantly came back to it every time we tried to introduce new materials to spark interest in other topics! We made bird feeders from toilet paper rolls -- here's how we did it:

spread peanut butter (or NoNutButter in this case)

Roll in birdseed

Add holes and string to hang!

We played in a birdseed sensory bin! The kids loved this bin and couldn't get enough of it. When we were finally finished with it, we threw the birdseed outside of our classroom windows and we attracted quite an array of bird species!

Bird Seed Sensory Bin

Bird Seed Bin

We painted bird feeders:

I introduced the book "Over in the Meadow" by Ezra Jack Keats

Here's the bulletin board that we made to go with our counting story:

... which opened up interest to other creatures including bugs and small animals! We took a field trip to the science museum and got to see many bugs up close - so cool!

We followed up with a variety of activities about bugs and spiders. Here are pictures of some of the 'insect-like' creatures my students made from playdoh.

We ended the year with pond/frog activities.. The pond sensory bin, with bugs, lily pads, blue & green flat glass stones, dragonflies and a variety of funnels and contains for scooping and pouring was a hit.

This summer, I'm preparing for a month long unit on Dinosaurs! So excited to do this unit because it never seems to fit into the regular school year and I think that the kids will really enjoy such a fun topic!