More reasons to love PVC pipes

(as if you needed any!)

Define your mud play kitchen dining area:

A makeshift water spout:

Create an atelier:

As a wonderful "loose part":

And, of course, blowing bubbles:

I linked up with:

Silhouettes

For our All About Me theme, we did body tracings and painted them with our skin color. We mixed these paints to create a close match to our own skin color.

 Okay, the display mural could have been nicer, but don't those body cutouts look great? And although the photo doesn't capture the display in the best light, isn't the array of skin tones beautiful?

After the children all did their bodies...

they insisted that we do one of our mascot:

Here we are trying to match Ro's skin tone:

We also traced the children's silhouettes using the overhead projector against the wall (sorry, no photos of the tracing process): 

The kids colored them with these crayons:

The best self-portraits are those of the self-initiated variety:

Family Portraits

The artists: three- and four-year-olds

 front

 back

My plan was to have them narrate a story about their family to me and I would make a glorious display of the family portraits and their family story.

Being the self-assured, independent, self-aware group of children that we have here at Beansprouts, here was what actually resulted from the pieces:

So, I take it, this means they loved their pictures so much...they wanted to wear them???

Sand Tray (An Activity and A Process)

Inspired from this product that was pinned on Pinterest, I made a new activity tray (a.k.a. "work").  

On a tray, I offered the children:

1. a smaller tray with sand

2. cards with simple patterns or shapes

3. a writing tool (a little plastic stick)

4. a tongue depressor that would act as the eraser (later to be switched out for combs)

I wanted to see how well the children could copy the patterns on the pattern cards, and for the most part they could. It was a good assessment for some children.  

One of the children didn't even want to attempt the triangle pattern and I could tell it was because the child was afraid of making it "wrong". This is a student who has an older sibling who no doubt, with good intentions, tries to "teach" the younger sibling how to do things like draw shapes.  The great thing is, if it weren't for this activity and closely observing the child, I wouldn't even have picked up on the child's need for guidance in this area.  Now I know that this child needs extra support in taking risks as well as getting out of right-and-wrong models. 

In the photo above, Br and Ha showed me that combs (taken from another work basket) actually work better as erasers because the tongue depressor just pushes the sand right out of the tray.  Combs also make beautiful striped patterns in the sand. 

Since our only playsand options were blue and purple, I stole some more natural-colored sandbox sand, which needed a good sifting.  Look at all of the debris caught by the colander.  Our sandbox is full of treasures.

Until next time!

Stephanie

Mini Easles

After a friend Craig sent me this great idea of using desktop easels and q-tips for a painting activity, I really wanted to do the activity, too.  So I used these dry erase boards and taped some triangular blocks to the back to elevate.  It took a few tries and angles before I found the right construction, but here it is:

Oh, and oops! I was out of Q-tips. And since I am quite fond of little ceramic dishes to hold the paint, the longer paint brushes kept tipping out of the bowls...

so it was time to adapt again...

When it was all set up, something felt incomplete.

Just add flowers...

and children!