Our dear friend B was home with a cold all week. Get well, B! We've missed you!
This week's fun was centered around food. In keeping with last week's Stone Soup play, at gathering on Tuesday morning, I asked T and V what sorts of things they liked in their soup: peas, noodles, red pepper, tomatoes and carrots were listed. Then we read "Feast for 10", a great counting book about preparing a family meal. Everyone counted the items aloud: pumpkins, pickles, chicken, carrots, pots, pans and so much more. Then, we looked at a couple Eric Carle books, because we'd use this idea of painted-paper collage for our Soup poster at the end of the week.
After this, we sat down to paint a single color, or mix two colors, on a whole sheet of paper. V chose to paint yellow and then mixed black and white to make a sheet of gray. T chose green, his favorite, mixed with a little yellow, followed by some yellow and red to mix into orange. Then after snack time, we clipped pictures out of the grocery store circulars for pages in our books about "What I Like To Eat".
Wednesday found us painting at the big easels. Although I offered both brushes and stamps, you could never tell-- the stamped-on color was met by another brush full of color and blended into the rest of the colors on their papers.
Thursday, we revisited the Stone Soup story, and made our poster: a big pot at the bottom of it (with a 'fire' drawn under it) , the children cut out the painted paper, which posed a new texture for cutting, being so thick. V said "I'm cutting out stones", making four stones for the pot, gluing each on as she cut them, and then added some yellow noodles to go in, and glued them above the pot. "They're falling in from the air!" T cut green shapes from his piece of paper and made a pile of the shapes. "What kind of vegetable could that be?" I asked. "I don't know yet" was the reply. After a few pieces of the green were glued on, he decided that they could be 'cabbages'. We learned that, in this case, the glue stick had to be rubbed onto both the paper of the poster, and the piece they just cut out, in order to get a good bond. A new process to learn, but both picked it up easily, and our poster looks very fun in our housekeeping area.
Our peas are in! We planted most of them on Tuesday afternoon; the children helped me dig a line of dirt, drop the peas in, and cover them up again. We've placed bird block over it to keep the birds and squirrels off them. When we return to school, we'll use a mortar and pestle to grind up eggshells to keep the slugs off.
Some other fun moments of our week:
T and V worked on another block skate park, and then both had strong ideas about what certain elements should look like. They checked in with each other before moving their friend's block placement.
"I've got a good idea. How about like that?"
"Could I make it like this cause it's more better please?"
They built 'tracks' for the skateboarders, with blocks stood on their ends to make little channels,which they then filled in. They embellished their park, but kept the original concept of the shape in place. Zoo blocks (from a few weeks ago) were added. Said V "Those blocks mean that animals are around."
Puzzles galore: spelling puzzles were out on Wednesday, two sets of words mixed into each pile, so the puzzles had to be separated as they worked. On Thursday, we brought out 48 piece jigsaw of dinosaurs and worked on it as a group. Then we gathered on the rug and I read a little bit of "Life Story" Virginia Burton's book on the history of the earth. The children laughed at all the funny names of the prehistoric dinosaurs and reptiles.
More pattern block play, with V using a center piece and working outward to make "a flower". T lined up six hexagons into pairs, then added squares on top of each piece, and a diamond in the space below between the hexagon pairs, to look like beaks. "They're owls, Hazel" he told me, and they did look like owls with square eyebrows!
Counting it out: we did some play with nuts, rolling them down a ramp into a big pot with a bowl placed in the center. How many nuts made it into the pot? The bowl? Now, how many all together? We also divided piles of nuts into two equal portions, the way your mother might have sorted out an equal share of candy "one, one, two, two," etc. We practiced counting to 13 and 15. Modeling this for our children will help them with this sort of social problem-solving in future years as well.
Games too: on Wednesday, we repaired our "Cariboo" game, which needed some new cards for the board, and then played this game, which focuses on matching shapes, letters and numbers. Thursday found us huddled around a spinner, playing "Forest Friends", an old game from my childhood in which children follow a sweet path of forest critters from beginning to end by spinning an animal and moving to it.
Wednesday also found us working together to fulfill an idea of V's: "I want to make a get better card for B" she suggested. We had an equal amount of fun dropping this, as well as another letter, into the big mailbox a few blocks away. Outdoors, we did quite a bit of chalk work in the driveway, walked in puddles around the puddle, used the side of the sandbox as a balance beam, and repeatedly hid and dug up 'treasures'. V would ask T to turn around, drop a sparkly gem into the sand, cover it and mark it with an "x" for him to dig up again. What a game!
On Thursday we had big fun washing off our paint trays from Tuesday. The dried paint flecked into the bubbles, coloring them. The children used wipers to scrub the trays and watched the color run and make a very muddy color in the water beneath the bubbles.
We'll see you all after Spring Break with more fun, an inspection of our pea sprouts, a visit to our huge flowering pots full with blossoming daffodils and other bursts of color. Spring is really feeling like it's here! Hooray!
