May 2013
6 posts
Pour Paintings
May 18, 2013
There was a video making the rounds a little over two years ago. It featured Holton Rower ( a grandson of Alexander Calder) pouring acrylic paint over large wooden structures. It was a big hit with several preschool teachers I know and we started looking for a way to do it with tempera rather than acrylic paint. Acrylic was too expensive but tempera alone wasn’t going to do...
3-2-1, Blast Off!
May 17, 2013
Some of the best moments in class are completely spontaneous…okay, most of them are. Today a couple of kids put together a train of chairs, dragging them into the middle of the room. They sat and scooted them forward in a kind of rough circle. At that moment I had to leave the room for a couple of minutes to check on something. (My partner was still there.)
When I...
Melting Crayons
May 13, 2013
A common preschool project is to get a warming tray and put some paper on it and draw with crayons. The heat from the warming tray melts the crayon as you’re drawing and you end up with thick waxy lines (or blobs, if you hold the crayon in one place for a bit.) We’ve done it other ways, too. We’ve arranged pieces of stripped crayons on the paper and let them melt. We’ve put...
Granite Blocks
May 6, 2013
I love our wooden unit blocks. We have a large collection because we have the leftovers from other classes that don’t have room to store as many as they’d like to have. The kids, especially this time of year, are building wonderful things, inventive things, and their constructions can stay up because they are outside on our covered, screened patio.
As much as I like unit...
Throwing Water
May 3, 2013
We’ve been throwing water again. We’ve done it for years.
As I remember, it started one day when I was emptying the water table we had at the time. (It has long since succumbed to the Arizona sun.) It was smaller than the one we have now, but it was all one piece and, when it was full, it was too heavy to just upend. So, I had to bail for a while first. I started, for no...
Curvy Boards
May 1, 2013
Thank goodness for First Things First, our new assessor. They are busy buying things for our playground and look what we got!
These boards are pricey (about $120 each, I think) but soooo worth it. They are called curvy boards and they are so open-ended. Just look at what our kids did with them the very first day. The first obvious choice is to rock them. The great thing is...
April 2013
7 posts
More about the Flower House
When they finished painting the flower house, I man-handled it into the room. It turned out to be a lot harder than I was expecting. I had to take the floor apart and collapse the whole house to get it inside. I set in up in our pretend center and it was an instant hit!
I thought it was perfect and so did the kids….well, all but one. A girl, working at one of our art tables, turned to me...
Thank you, St. Joe
Everyone knows that kids love boxes and the bigger the box the better. So when a friend showed up at school with a box for us, I immediately dubbed him St. Joe. (Actually, I’d already dubbed him that for some other things he’s helped with, but they were apart from school and the kids didn’t know him.) This, however, wasn’t just any box. It was a refrigerator box! One he’d seen driving his...
One Small Push
April 18, 2013
Sometimes you have to give them a little push…not because they need it but you do. I was getting awfully tired of lumps of clay with sticks in them, with seashells in them, with beads in them. So one day two weeks ago, I gave a child a lump of clay and asked “Wanna know how to make a pinch pot?”
They (I don’t remember if “they” was a he or a she) said yes. I shoved...
One Old Project, One New
April 16, 2013
Our classroom was full of flies last week. (Fortunately none of them were real; licensing is due any day now.) The kids, when they arrived last Monday morning, found a hula hoop, full of tape, hanging from the ceiling in a corner of our pretend center.
One of my students identified it as a spider web but, as usual, I told them I’d tell everyone about it at circle time…when I...
More Ghostly Doings
April 10, 2013
There was a good deal more going on with The Chocolate Chip Ghost beyond just telling the story. The felt ghosts got left out with the flannel board so the kids could re-tell the story. This involves figuring out what the ghosts ate that turned them the different colors—if you were telling the traditional story.
I know some kids made up completely new stories because I...
The Chocolate Chip Ghost
April 9, 2013
There is a story called Chocolate Chip Ghost that has been around my preschool as long as I’ve been here. It’s usually told as a flannel board story, often at Halloween…but not this year. It’s not actually a Halloween story, just a story about ghosts, so this year I did it this past week. The story involves a boy ghost, a girl ghost, and their mother. The mother needs to go...
It Wobbles!!
April 2, 2013
While we were blasting our way through outer space, there were other activities going on in our room. One was a variation on the preschool stand-by of marble painting. Instead of using marbles to move the paint around the paper, we used plastic Easter eggs.’
These weren’t however just any Easter eggs. Each one had marbles hidden inside. There was a one marble egg and two....
Traveling through Space
March 31, 2013
So we’ve spent the past week traveling through outer space. It’s not the only thing we did, but it was the most popular. I had been afraid that the kids would end up fighting over the pilot’s job, but Monday morning the group that went to play in the space ship scattered among the various stations. (Yes, there were also children who chose other activities...
March 2013
7 posts
A Trip to Outer Space
March 25, 2013
We’re spending this week in outer space. From a single Internet picture of a small kitchen unit wrapped in foil to become a command center, we’ve created a space ship area that takes up about a third of our room. There’s the command center, placed directly in front of our big white board. I’ve drawn the space ship’s windshield on it with a few planets and an asteroid, but...
All from a Strip of Paper
March 19, 2013
We use a paper chain to keep track of how many days we’ve been in school. We add a link every day and we count to see how long the chain is, EXCEPT…
by this time of the year, we’d be spending half the morning counting the chain and who has that kind of time to spare? Soooo, sometime around the twelfth or thirteenth day of school, we point out the problem and write a big “10”...
WANTED!
March 16, 2013
We had our second VIP Night recently. When I started teaching pre-school, all those years ago, we did a Dads’ Night and a Moms’ Tea. The tea was in the morning, during school, and it wasn’t a problem, since most moms of preschoolers didn’t have jobs outside the home. Then the tea got changed to a Moms’ Night, as more and more moms went back to work. Finally, about ten years ago...
Getting Out of their Way
March 8, 2013
I sometimes publish a wish list and I asked, a couple of months ago, for an old umbrella. I got one right away, took the fabric off, and then put it away for a while. I knew what I wanted to do with it, but wasn’t sure the kids were ready. (In retrospect, I think what I mean by that is that I had my own image of what the finished sculpture would look like. Bad teacher!)
So I...
Two Different Kinds of Observation
March 6, 2013
We try to do a science experiment every week and by that I mean something more than putting out a collection of sea shells or doing a demonstration of an experiment. We have sea shells and we do demos of experiments, but I’m talking about something more interactive. This week I really wanted to do an experiment that shows how important hand washing is. We took two slices of an...
Work/Play
March 2, 2013
Maybe it’s because we have a workbench or maybe because, when the Unicorns were a class of young fives, we were the oldest kids in the school. We’re not anymore; we are now a class of fours turning five, but people still bring us projects to build. (It must be the workbench.) So when our director showed up with a new toy that required some assembly, we immediately took it...
Who Would Have Thought?
February 28, 2013
Do you remember this picture?
It’s a canvas we paint or pour or toss all the leftover paint onto at the end of the day. Well, several parents noticed it drying out in the hallway and mentioned how much they liked it. One dad suggested we should put it in the preschool auction, which was coming up. So we did…and someone bought it! Of course, now we need a...
February 2013
9 posts
Slide Painting
February 26, 2013
Someone described this art project to me, so I’m only guessing that this is what she meant. Anyway, this is the way we did it. I’ve mentioned frequently that I have a certain hoarding problem, especially when it comes to preschool. For reasons unknown, I’d even saved a plastic storage box with a cracked bottom. Now I’ve found a use for it.
I put it out with paper in...
The Unicorn Joke Book
February 22, 2013
We have always “published” books in my preschool class. Usually they’re covered with a piece on construction paper and I enjoy thinking of a simple graphic to make so that the kids can recognize the book, since they can’t read the title. This year, our books were getting read so much that I’ve had to move them to white binders (thank you, Treasures 4 Teachers!), so that...
We Are ALL Teachers
February 16, 2013
For about ten minutes the other day, we only had two students. (We have to pick up any kids from childcare early, before class starts.) They both chose to sit down at our drawing table in the outdoor classroom. The girl drew a couple of lines and the boy copied them on his paper. They hadn’t discussed it, but both immediately recognized the game. She drew some more lines and...
Everyone Needs to Read This →
Preschool's Favorite Color--Muddy Brown
February 12, 2013
I saw this project online and thought it would be perfect for my more rambunctious kids. Cotton balls are dipped in paint and thrown against a piece of paper. They’re too light to hurt anyone and even if they hit someone, all they’d leave is paint (and possibly some outrage.) I decided our outdoor classroom would be perfect!
I covered both the fence and the sidewalk with...
Impromptu Rock Concert
February 10, 2013
We had an impromptu rock concert the other day. Three boys began by getting out our two “electric” guitars. They are meant to be plugged in to a computer or a TV and make no sound on their own. The idea is that the kids will provide the music themselves. Then they began bedecking themselves with jewelry from the box in our housekeeping center. It turns out that rock stars...
A Quick Recycling Project
February 7, 2013
We had done an art project with paper plates where we put some dots of paint on the plates and then swirled them (paint-side down, of course) on pieces of paper. The kids liked the resulting art, but what I liked where the paper plates. I decided to let them dry and do something with them.
I was doing the outside classroom (my partner and I alternate inside and outside)...
A Unintended Lesson in Perseverance
February 3, 2013
The traditional preschool bird feeder wasn’t an option for us. We’re not allowed to use toilet paper tubes and we’re a no-nut school, which includes peanut butter. So I was quite excited to find another bird feeder that was so simple I couldn’t pass it up. All the kids would need to do is string Cheerios (plain Cheerios, not Honey Nut Cheerios) on pipe cleaners. I knew they...
Large-scale Marble Painting
January 31, 2013
Every preschool teacher marble paints, usually using a soda flat (or beer flat) to hold the paper and marbles. As you know, if you are a regular reader of this blog, you can also use a coffee can to great effect. Ah, but someone gave us a box from the wall-mount for a TV. It’s perfect; it’s big enough that one child can’t handle it alone. It needs to be a community project,...
January 2013
9 posts
The Work of Preschool
January 25, 2013
We had a bang up finish to our week. The big hit was our light table which featured black sand and a TV running a video of a sand artist working with a similar set-up. I’ve written about this before. Like all popular projects, though, it slowly settled down to the point where almost no one went over there today. (I’m always amazed at the fact that even the most popular...
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I've Waited Years for This
January 23, 2013
We were on the playground today, just my class. A group of four kids approached the tire swing, where three students were enjoying themselves. The four started growling, rather like dinosaurs, getting louder and fiercer as a minute or two passed. There were shrieks from the swing and the three children jumped off the apparatus and took off running, with the group of four in hot...
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A Second Thought on Yesterday's Post
January 21, 2013
I was looking at the picture of our “extra” canvas and had a thought. Do you see the long, yellow drip? I had always laid it flat to dry (silly, prosaic me!) Someone else put it out one day last week and they just leaned it against the wall (on our plastic drying spot.) Soooo…..
What would happen if you took each day’s leftover paint and dropped it into three or four big...
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We Need a Better Name Than "Extra Canvas"
January 20, 2013
One of the problems with having our tempera paint out and available to the class was that we needed to find something to put the paint in. We didn’t want them opening the bottles, just squeezing some out. (Tell the truth; doesn’t every preschool class have at least ONE child who would squeeze the entire 16-oz. of paint onto their piece of paper? I LOVE these scientific...
4 tags
Duck Races---Sort Of
January 13, 2012
Once again I had a great idea that didn’t quite work out. (Teaching will certainly keep you humble!) When we ordered a new water table last year, it turned out to be significantly longer than our old one and we had to do some re-arranging outside where we kept it. Since then, one of my goals has been to capitalize on its length, hoping to do things the old water table didn’t...
4 tags
More Pizza
January 10, 2013
I wanted to add a couple of details about our pizza parlor. I had forgotten to put out our cash register, but the kids took care of that for me. This told me that they weren’t just playing; they were thinking about how to make it better. Then on Tuesday before school, I did some rearranging in that corner of the room and enlarged the pizza parlor. It meant sacrificing our...
4 tags
I'll Take Sausage and Olive
January 7, 2013
About fifteen years ago, my preschool made a conscious effort to change from doing mostly crafts to doing free art (or process-oriented art or—as I like to call it—real art.) One of the things I loved about this change was that I no longer spent my evenings cutting out sixteen cowboy boots for them to paint or sixteen ladybug parts for them to assemble. But there are some...
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Tilting the Frame
January 3, 2012
This is another project I stole from someone else. (We’ve been doing it for a couple of years so I know longer remember just where I gleaned it from.) I began by getting acrylic picture frames from the Dollar Tree. Whatever it’s called where you live, it is one of any teacher’s best friends, second only to Goodwill’s dollar days. I was looking for acrylic box frames but they...
December 2012
10 posts
4 tags
Last Minute Changes
December 29, 2012
I’d given our “house” (or whatever the kids decide to call it) a good deal of thought. I had part of a bolt of brown cloth (thank you, Art Resource Center!) that I was going to cover the house with. But, at the last minute, I changed my mind…at least partially. You may remember my previous posts on the strips of cloth we had. Some had been made into dance ribbons, but we had...
4 tags
A (Very) Mini Blitz Build
If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile, you may remember that last school year a neighbor gave me a huge box that we turned into an outdoor reading room. Alas, over the summer it succumbed to the ravages of desert critters, probably mice. Although we were afraid we’d never find another, we kept looking. I was on the verge of going to a furniture store and begging, when the Internet...
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More Support for a Play-Based Curriculum
Here’s my Christmas present to all of you:
http://www.ted.com/talks/stuart_brown_says_play_is_more_than_fun_it_s_vital.html
4 tags
I Wasn't Expecting That!
December 21, 2012
At the beginning of the year (way back in 110 degree August), the kids used our workbench mostly for trying to hammer nails into pieces of wood. Most of the first nails fell out, but they got better and better. Then we added our hacksaws and they quickly caught on to sawing pieces of wood…at least most of them did. Eventually they started nailing two pieces of wood together....
4 tags
Instructions for Making a Snowman in the Desert
December 18, 2012
My preschool is in Phoenix, where it hasn’t snowed enough to stick on the ground in 28 years. (Even then, making a snowman would have required all the snow in your yard…and a couple of neighbors’ yards, too, probably.) So my students were intrigued when I told them we were going to make a snowman. As good Phoenicians, they probably guessed that no snow would be involved.
What...
5 tags
Chihuly--Part II
December 14, 2012
So we had a plastic cup sculpture that looked pretty good (if I do say so myself!) but I wasn’t done experimenting. (Notice the use of “I” in that sentence. I don’t like that the kids couldn’t get to do anything besides coloring the plastic. I’m resolved: that is going to change next year!!) So we had a collection of food containers that were all #6 plastic. I was saving them...
5 tags
Chihuly-esque
December 13, 2012
If you follow any preschool blogs or the education category on pinterest, you’re probably aware that almost everyone has tried to make a sculpture that looks like the work of Dale Chihuly. “Almost everyone” now includes us. Yesterday and the day before, we had a table set up with clear plastic cups (the lowball kind) and a bin of colored sharpies. The timing was perfect. This...
4 tags
Best Answer EVER!
December 10, 2012
There aren’t a lot of projects we do every year. We’ve made class t-shirts since the first or second year I taught; I’m having trouble thinking of another. Well, except for this one: for the last twenty years or so, at Christmastime, we’ve done Gifts to the World.
It begins with a discussion of what we mean by that. Not everyone wants a Barbie doll. A baby boy has no...
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All Good Teaching Involves Plagarism
December 5, 2012
Teaching is not a zero-sum game. You can have a great idea and that’s wonderful for your students. Giving your ideas away, however, means that they can influence tons of classes, without taking anything away from your students. So here’s an idea that I’m proud to say I stole from a colleague. She had her class decorate strips of paper and used them as borders on her bulletin...
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Donations Welcome
December 2, 2012
People are always giving me things, odd bits and pieces from their work or a hobby or their lives. Sometimes I know right away what I want to do with them. Sometimes I don’t need to; the kids in my class will figure it out. Sometimes things sit around for quite a while before inspiration strikes. I seem to have acquired the reputation of a recycler and it’s not unusual to open...
November 2012
6 posts
4 tags
On My Soapbox (Well, One of Them)
November 26, 2012
I hate it when public school teachers present science as a collection of set-in-stone facts to be memorized. First of all, we know what can happen to a fact. I was taught in school that there were nine planets circling our sun. There were occasional articles speculating about a tenth planet out there somewhere, but no one, absolutely NO ONE, considered the possibility that we’d...
3 tags
Community Week, Part Deux
November 24, 2012
Because we have both an indoor and outdoor classroom, we can have a lot more activities going on for Community Week. Perhaps I shouldn’t call it an outdoor classroom; it’s just the sidewalk outside our room and about a foot of soil between the sidewalk and the fence. It holds an awful lot, though. During Community Week, threes and fours visiting the “Home Depot,” are welcome to...
