Learning from Preschoolers

Smooshing Clay

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 14:10:54 -0700

June 16, 2013

We have MaryAnn Kohl to thank for this project. While we used paper plates, any good, thick paper would do; we liked the limited area though, as it kept the smooshed clay close together.

The clay is plasticine modeling clay, not play dough or air-drying clay. I couldn’t find Crayola’s plasticine, which MaryAnn recommended. I did find this clay which came in beautiful colors, so I decided to give it a try.

This project was easier to demonstrate than to explain. I took a very small piece of clay, put it on a plate, put my thumb on it, and pulled it along. Then, choosing another color, I took a second piece and “smooshed” it beside the first. The kids got to see the colors blend at the edges.

Then they went to work. It was very popular. As so often happens, they came up with their own variations.

The biggest modification was using larger pieces of clay to decorate the rims of the plates. They looked great, but, alas, used up more clay. We actually ran out in less than the day’s free play time. I hate when that happens, but aren’t the plates great?

One More Quickie

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 21:36:18 -0700

June 1, 2013

There’s one more thing I want to share with you before signing off for the summer (and who knows? maybe not the last “one more thing”) You may remember that I’d acquired a canvas from The Art Resource Center and the class had painted it using leftover paint from each day’s projects. Then we’d sold it at the preschool’s annual auction. I headed back to The Art Resource Center and got another canvas. We started all over again and here’s what we had at the end of the year.

I really like it. I’m thinking about framing it and hanging it at home. I’ve already got another, bigger canvas to start off next school year.

OUR Peace Book

Wed, 29 May 2013 23:07:13 -0700

May 29, 2013

Before I sign off for the summer (or at least for a big part of it,) I want to share the last book this class wrote together. I’ve written before about making books with the Unicorns, but there was a new twist this year. The books were amazingly popular; the kids were reading them quite literally to pieces. I had to move them to white binders (thank you, Treasures4Teachers!) I kinda miss the cute 3-D covers I made for them, but they are holding up so much better.

I read the class two pages of Todd Parr’s The Peace Book, just enough to give them a taste. Then I asked each of them for their idea of peace. The next morning we illustrated their pages. Here they are, my handwriting, their words and pictures:

A Growing Sculpture, a Shrinking Pile of Scrap Paper

Fri, 24 May 2013 17:07:00 -0700

May 24, 2013

Today was the last day of school. One of my goals this week has been to use up a lot of our scrap paper. It does tend to pile up over the course of the year. Our construction paper is out and always available to my students. Next to it is a large wire basket that we put big pieces of scrap paper in when we clean up. Next to the basket is a bell, like the desk bell in a hotel. Anyone who uses scrap paper instead of a fresh sheet gets to ring the bell and be thanked for saving paper.

Well, that’s the way it’s supposed to work. Fours and fives are not by nature thrifty with paper (or any supplies, for that matter.) So they begin to learn and we end up with a basket of scraps. There are several projects we do during the year that use some of them, filling our sensory table with scraps and putting out craft scissors to make fancy cuts, for instance.

So here’s what we did to use up some more. We took four boxes and taped them shut. Then we put out glue and our basket of scraps. We encouraged the kids to cut or tear the paper or just glue it on whole. It took three days, a box a day. Thursday no one worked on the fourth box and Friday we got a little bit of decoration. That’s okay. I got a great, growing sculpture to fill our display shelves in the hallway, as I gave back their individual art all week long.

Pour Paintings

Sat, 18 May 2013 22:46:43 -0700

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 it.

My first thought was to thin it down with some water. It didn’t work. Meanwhile Tom Hobson in Seattle was thickening it with white glue. It turned out that the magic formula was 2-3 parts glue to 1 part tempera.

As soon as I read his blog, I started putting it together…on a much smaller scale than Mr. Rower. We already had wooden cubes. I glued them 2 high in the middle of pieces of cardboard. Knowing from experience that kids are perfectly capable of pouring an entire 16-oz. bottle of tempera onto the cubes, we opted for small paper cups, then for sturdier nut cups. We wanted the kids to change paint colors frequently, in the hopes that previously poured paint would be pushed along.

It worked! Did it look like Holton Rower’s beautiful pieces. Well, no, not exactly. But they were beautiful!

Two years of pour paintings, however, ran us out of my perfect cubes. I’d seen tall painting done over small terra cotta pots and over nothing at all, just poured onto the cardboard, but I didn’t want to do either of those for various reasons. So what could I use?

Cups! Five ounce paper cups! They were slightly harder to glue to the cardboard, but that just took a few extra minutes of prep time. Other than that they worked just fine.

After two days of that, we decided to change it up a bit. I got some bigger cups and much bigger pieces of cardboard. We did significantly bigger pour paintings!

I’m never going back to wooden cubes when cups are so much cheaper!

3-2-1, Blast Off!

Fri, 17 May 2013 22:28:25 -0700

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 returned there were a lot more chairs in the middle of the room, all of them turned upside down. They were arranged in three long rows and the kids were lounging against the upturned seat. Some of them were looking at .books. Some were playing with stuffed animals and dolls.

I was thinking of asking what they were doing, but I hated to interrupt their game. Two kids were walking up and down the rows delivering “air packs.” Air packs? That sounds kinda like a space ship. Just then there was a countdown. Okay, a space ship. I started snapping photos as fast as I could, knowing this wonderful game could be over as quickly as it started.

Just then another teacher arrived with the answer to the question I’d gone to check on. The kids invited her to take an empty seat on their rocket. Being a great teacher, she did, of course! I’d love to share the one photo I managed to get of her but she’s surrounded by too many faces. Oh, well. I love my co-workers!

Melting Crayons

Mon, 13 May 2013 17:12:41 -0700

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 pieces of crayons in cups on the warming tray and, when they’re completely melted, poured them on a piece of paper. I’m particularly fond of this last one. It results in big, very smooth areas of waxy color.

In fact, I was going to do it again this year, but, when I tried it after school one day, I couldn’t get the crayons to melt. The warming tray was different; perhaps it wasn’t warm enough. The cups were different, too; perhaps they had too much rim and held the bottom too far off the tray.

Anyway, this is what I came up with for a replacement project.

I had a big bag of stripped crayons ready to go. I had the kids pick out a piece of construction paper and put it in a low-sided box. A shirt box or a beer flat would do.

Then they picked a crayon and put it on the paper. I held it in place with a wooden ruler. Then the kids turned on a blow dryer and melted the crayon.

And blew the melted crayon around the paper! All I had to do was hold the crayon with the ruler and occasionally suggest they get a little closer with the blow dryer. They did all the rest.

It was, as you can see, great!

Granite Blocks

Mon, 06 May 2013 14:09:57 -0700

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 blocks, however, my favorite building toy has to be our tub of granite scraps. I got them several years ago at Treasures 4 Teachers, a wonderful recycling center in nearby Tempe.

There are all different shapes of pieces but far and away the most common is long and relatively thin, with three flat sides (call them for the moment the bottom, the front, and the back) sometimes polished and sometimes not. The fourth side (we’re ignoring the ends right now) is rough and irregular, as if it were broken from a bigger piece…which, I suppose, it probably was.

Beginning builders can stack the flat sides, one atop another, or they can lay the pieces out in long lines or corrals. As the kids acquire more skills, they can begin to balance the granite on the jagged edges of the pieces below. This is when the unique shapes come into play. Unit blocks teach some things precisely because they’re so regular. Granite is just the opposite and teaches other things. What teacher wouldn’t want both in her classroom?

Throwing Water

Fri, 03 May 2013 19:57:00 -0700

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 particular reason, to toss the water high in the air. In that moment, water throwing was born.

“Why should I have all the fun?” The next day, at clean-up time, I took a couple of kids outside to help me bail. Yup, they had almost as much fun as I’d had. We had found a new outdoor activity.

The kids use some small blue (medical) tubs we have. I encourage them to look at the water in the air. It seems, for a second, to just hang there. Then it splits apart into a hundred dazzling diamonds (well, if there’s sun…which there almost always is, here in Phoenix.)

Of course the kids enjoy experimenting.. Sometimes the tub goes, too.

They also love spinning the water in a circle around themselves. This year there was a good deal of filling the small tub with water and dumping it on one’s own head. It was perfect weather for it. Some kids got really soaked and still, they were dry by the time they went home a couple of hours later. Perfect!

Curvy Boards

Wed, 01 May 2013 16:15:00 -0700

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 that smaller children keep their feet closer together and only rock a little. Bigger fours and fives can straddle the whole length and rock to their own abilities. Every child can find their own comfort zone.

They can also be turned over and stood on, like a mountain top, or used, as one of my girls did, as a springboard for flying leaps.

My favorite idea came from two of my girls. It’s my favorite because I didn’t think of it at all. They turned them back and made them into sun lounges! Need some sunscreen, girls?

More about the Flower House

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:30:00 -0700

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 and said “It needs a mailbox.” Well, she was right! It absolutely did! I went back to the “teacher counter” where I found an empty Kleenex box. I had had other plans for it, but they weren’t as immediate as the need for a mailbox.

I went to tape it to the flower house and the girl came along…I guess to be sure I taped it to her standards. It was a fantastic idea she had because there was an immediate interest in creating letters to go in the box. Our writing center hasn’t been that busy since the last time we had a mailbox in the room!

Thank you, St. Joe

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 15:32:28 -0700

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 kids around! It was big enough for the kids to walk into. Huzzah for suddenly changed lesson plans!

We began by voting what we were going to turn the box into. The class came up with four ideas: a house, a castle, a Hot Wheels house, and a flower house. Then we voted. In my class, we never vote by raising our hands. Fours and fives really don’t get the one man//one vote idea. They’d raise their hands for all four. Maybe because they want to vote for the winner? Or maybe because each idea sounds so good when you’re voting? Or maybe because they just noticed their best friend raising a hand? It might be anything, so we vote by standing in different parts of the room. It helps; there’s still a lot of switching sides when they notice where their friends are standing, but we call a halt to the moving and that’s the final vote. Flower house was the winner (by a landslide!)

We started painting that very morning. I marked the door and two windows. I told the class not to worry about avoiding the windows. When they were cut out, they could become pictures on the inside of the walls of the house. So paint away, kids! It’s the process, not the product. The product is for playing in…(more to come!)

One Small Push

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 17:12:54 -0700

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 my two thumbs into the center and proceeded to pinch the sides of a very rudimentary pot. “Can you do that?” I asked balling up the clay again and handing it over.

Of course, they could and before I knew it, I had a table full of pinch pots drying on our table. The next day I offered paint and on the third day I got out two small bottles of acrylic glaze “to make them shiny.” We now had pots in every stage of development and everywhere in between. One girl, for instance, wanted to glaze her unpainted pot. Sure, why not! So this went on for a while and then earlier this week a girl asked for some clay and told me that she wasn’t going to make a pot; she was going to make something else.

She made a long thin animal but didn’t like it. She started again with the same clay and made a heftier animal. It was, she informed me a guinea pig. It actually did look like a long haired guinea pig with no legs visible. “Do you have a guinea pig?” I asked. The longer I looked at it, the more like a guinea pig it looked! “No, we went to a guinea pig store but we DIDN’T GET ONE (this was quite adamant.) We just went to the store.”

The next day she wanted to paint it but as she picked it up, the two tiny ears fell off. I gave her a choice: she could paint the guinea pig and the ears separately and then glue them on OR she could glue them on today and paint it tomorrow. She ran to get the glue. The ears were so tiny I finally had to help her glue them on. Then we covered the drying guinea pig with a bucket to protect the ears from the wind. (Our clay table is outside.) She even noticed that the handle of the bucket was caught under one side and she was worried that the wind might get in. We fixed that.

I can’t tell you with what trepidation I lifted the pail off the next morning but there were the two ears firmly glued in place. Hurrah! The girl spent today painting her sculpture. She painted a wide white stripe and then wanted brown paint, but she was stumped. We were out of brown paint! So she and I went on a quest to other rooms of the school and found some brown paint. She then finished the body with a blue stripe.

The ears were painted blue and the rest of the face brown. Doesn’t it look exactly like a long-haired guinea pig? (Are there long-haired guinea pigs or is that hamsters I’m thinking of?)

That’s when she informed me that the two tiny pieces glued to the head were not ears; they were eyes. Okay, Rachel, but I still see a guinea pig whenever I look at it, especially in this photo.

Don’t you?

One Old Project, One New

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 22:16:04 -0700

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 told them that, yes, he was right. It was a web with the tape sticky side out.

Nearby on a table was a basket of cotton balls. These were the flies and the object was to send them flying along and let the web “catch” them.

The cotton balls, once they were caught in the web, actually looked like flies that a spider had wrapped in silk.

Tuesday morning we added more flies, this time small pieces of black paper suspended from the ceiling.

In each child’s mailbox was a party blower, or, as we preferred to call it, a long, sticky frog’s tongue. They stood amidst the pieces of paper and tried to catch the “flies” with their new tongues.

It wasn’t quite as popular as a trip to Disneyland, but it came close.

More Ghostly Doings

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 16:39:52 -0700

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 overheard a fistful of ghosts speaking rather harshly to another fistful of ghosts.

Some kids chose to make patterns with the ghosts instead of telling any story at all. That’s okay, too.

We also had a Xeroxed sheet of ghosts for the kids to color and cut apart. There was a larger mommy ghost and six smaller ghosts.

They could be colored any color the kids wanted although, if they wanted to tell the traditional version of the story, we suggested that they leave the mommy and two of the smaller ghosts white. Some did; some didn’t.

Once they were either cut out or, at least, cut apart (depending on the skill of the kids), there were envelopes available to put all the ghosts in to make it easy to take home. I wonder how many parents enjoyed the story, whatever story they happened to hear. I bet it was every single one of them.

The Chocolate Chip Ghost

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 21:48:54 -0700

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 shopping and tells her kids to keep playing upstairs and, under no circumstance, are they to go down to the kitchen where food is waiting for a party that night.

Of course, one of them does. At my school, it is usually the boy who breaks first and heads down to the kitchen. It could be either one. When he comes back upstairs, his sister knows what he has eaten because—switcheroo—he has changed color. The story goes on with each of the kids making forays down to the kitchen, eating or drinking something, and changing color.

When they hear mom’s car in the driveway, they know the jig is up. Fortunately, one of them has a brilliant idea, runs downstairs, and returns having turned white. He/She whispers to the other sibling who promptly does the same. Mom comes upstairs to find her children just as she left them (although the mice seem to have gotten into the party food.)

The kids enjoy guessing what food they’ve eaten and figuring out what they eat or drink to turn white in the end. This year about two visits before the end, one of my students commented “Why don’t they go drink milk?” That would do it. So would cottage cheese. So would vanilla ice cream. So would anything white your kids can think of. Try it.

It Wobbles!!

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 14:31:54 -0700

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. There were giant marbles and medium-sized marbles. Each one was different.

The eggs were dunked in paint and dropped in a box with paper at the bottom. Then the box was tilted this way and that. They didn’t however just roll. They wobbled all over the place creating jagged lines of paint.

It was exactly the effect I had tried for before, but I had always tried to attach the weights inside the eggs. I’d never been thrilled with the results. The loose marbles, however, gave me what I was looking for. They wobbled like Mexican jumping beans, exactly the effect I wanted. Yay!

Traveling through Space

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 20:39:10 -0700

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 altogether.) Someone played pilot; someone was the co-pilot; but kids also chose to investigate the communications center and the navigation center.

Several children decided to try drawing pictures wearing big, cumbersome astronaut gloves. Remarkably, they did pretty well at it, too.

There was also a group who decided to begin by making a space helmet. There were long pieces of stiff paper with a rectangle cut in the middle for the kids to see out. The rectangle was covered with auto window film. The kids could see out but no one could see in. I asked each child whether they wanted to be a pilot (Captain So-and-so) or a scientist (Doctor Somebody) and then wrote the appropriate legend over the rectangle. They were free to decorate the helmet with stickers or markers (or both.) Then I stapled the backs to make cylinders that fit over their heads.

On Monday and Tuesday we also made an observatory. We began by painting the entire inside of a big box totally black. Then, when it was dry, we added stars painted with glow in the dark paint. On Wednesday, before school, I placed it directly under one of our ceiling lights. When the kids arrived we laid the box on its side and let the kids crawl in one at a time. We threw a cloth over the end and they got to lay on their backs and observe the night sky.

On Wednesday one of our art tables was filled with supplies for making space ships: Styrofoam plates and bowls, clear plastic bubble tops that had been donated by Starbucks, straws, stickers, long mailing tubes, paper towel tubes, and more. There were no instructions other than all the gluing had to be done at the other table (which was covered.) They made rocket-type space ships, saucer-like space ships, and space ships that the world had never seen before. Meanwhile kids played in the room’s space ship every day. It was nothing short of awesome, but then that’s the way preschool is.

A Trip to Outer Space

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 20:52:05 -0700

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 there’s plenty of room for the kids to draw more.

On one side of the command center is a game controller that serves to steer the ship. Next to it is a great find from Goodwill, a several layer tape recorder that’s loaded with knobs to turn, buttons to press, and a line of level controls that go up and down. My thought was that that’s for the co-pilot, but, of course, that’s just MY idea. The kids will have their own.

Next to the command center is the desk from our writing center with a tabletop light table on it. I had, months ago, opened up the back and switched the light to a purple rope light. (I had also completely forgotten I’d done that.) They look like stars on our navigation center. I added an overlay with concentric circles on it, some odd mirrors, and a handful of flat sided marbles.

On the other side of the command center is our communication center. It has several phones zip-tied to it, as well as a plug-in timer for lights. It’s there because it makes a great noise when the dial is turned. There are several circuit boards we’ve rescued from machines we’ve take apart and a small personal recorder, whose bright colors label it as a kids’ toy. The front has buttons to press, but if someone presses the small button on top, the recorder will talk to them.

The last of the ship’s floor space is filled with a round table we’ve labeled the task table. For the moment it has a tub of crayons, some paper and two pairs of gardening gloves. The idea is to see how much more difficult it is to do simple tasks in oversized, cumbersome gloves. We’ll change the tasks each day.

Hanging from the ceiling are the paper plates that the kids used to make art, that then became a sculpture, and that are now stapled back to back to be planets. Recycled twice! I love my job!!

All from a Strip of Paper

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 18:18:07 -0700

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” on the appropriate link. Then we start counting from there, so besides the practice counting, some students (those who are ready and interested) are also learning to count by 10’s. We don’t count the whole chain again until the 100^th day of school.

Sometime in early to mid-April, we’ll ask the kids to estimate how long the chain will be on the last day of school. That used to be part of the 100^th Day celebration, but waiting until April gives them a better chance of coming close.

We also use the chain to teach about patterns. When school starts in the heat of August, the strips are yellow, like the relentless sunshine (we’re in Phoenix, remember.) September is red, but in October we use alternating strips of orange and black. November is a three-color pattern and the patterns get more complicated as the year goes on. For May, we go back to yellow strips, just as it’s hitting 100 degrees with regularity. It brings the school year full cycle.

Adding the strip and counting the days is a job that rotates through the class. When the school year starts, their names are on the strip. Once we’ve been through the class list a couple of times, we begin to change the way we reference the children. Besides, for instance, “Jacob” a particular child is also “Mr. Smith,” the child whose name is spelled J-A-C-O-B,” the one whose initials are “J.S.,” “Ellen’s son,” and “Kasey’s brother.” We use their addresses and phone numbers. There are so many ways to call up the same child, ways in which they haven’t thought of themselves before.

All from strips of paper, added to a chain each day…