Spring Breathes Life to the World

After a long Winter sleep, Spring is officially just days away, and we are anticipating the seasonal changes that wake up the Earth.  When the Northern Hemisphere warms up, we expect to see plants bud and bloom.

Today we dissected old flowers from a bouquet.  As we took apart petals, stems, and leaves, we found interesting flower parts like where a flower keeps her eggs!  And, how the pollen is dusty, and sneaks down the tube to find the hiding eggs.  We also talked about different functions of the plant parts: petals are usually brightly colored to attract birds and insects to the nectar, stems hold up the flower and act like straws to suck water up to the top of the plant, and plants need to share pollen so the eggs can grow into more flower seeds.

We pretended to be "flower fairies" to help the garden grow.  Plants grow in order: roots down, shoots up, leaves, buds, and sometimes flowers and fruit.

We used toy butterflies to pretend to drink nectar from our flowers, and carry pollen around.  The flowers and leaves helped hide the butterfly eggs so we can "hatch more baby butterflies" (AKA- caterpillars).

Our Friend "Bride" decided to decorate the tree by adding flowers, and it was exciting to see Spring bring out her blossoms!

Outside, we continued to learn about Spring weather (even though today was very cold!).  The mountain snow will be melting and filling our rivers with fresh water.  We loved simulating a full spring brook with this flowing, specialized, water table.

When the bucket fills enough to tip, it makes a big wave that sends our boats over the waterfall and fills the next bucket.

The anticipation of the bucket flipping is intense!  Well worth the wait, it's exciting to see the wave of water work in a cause and effect method.

And let's remember that air warmed by the Sun doesn't just sit around, it moves!  Spring can be a very windy time as warm air rises high and cool air whooshes low.  What better way to play with wind than by chasing bubbles in a breeze?

Welcome Spring and all the fun, interesting, and colorful aspects you bring to the world!  We might be young at Harmony's House, but we notice you Spring.  In fact, we are learning all about Spring with our whole bodies and all of our senses.  Life just couldn't be more exciting!

February is a Great Month to Share Love

This month at Harmony's House we are remembering Black History and celebrating Valentine's Day!  Every month, every day, is a great time to love others and be kind, but February gives us a special opportunity to think about ways to show it.

Loving others requires noticing hidden qualities that make people unique and special!  In this fun box, the students will be invited to shift, smooth, and organize the pebbles to find the hidden heart.

Speaking of hidden things, can you spot the tiny letters hiding in the Explore Table?  These are fun little things to find, especially when we find our friends' and family members' letters!

Sometimes people are lonely around Valentine's Day, or feel unappreciated and under-represented.  Our Toy and Puzzle Area offers the children a chance to "mend the broken hearts" by counting and matching quantity to number.  

A few days ago, Ms. Harmony was reading to a school friend at her home, and she excitedly said, "Look!  She has a hijab!"  Impressive word use, but even more cool was that she shared her positive feelings about someone who was a different religion and culture than herself.  Ms. Harmony added this puzzle of a young girl wearing hijab to help children feel more familiar and comfortable with diversity.

Let's talk about ATTRACTION... magnetic attraction, that is!  One of our tinker tables has a tray of magnetic, and non-magnetic things to explore.  Even some of the sensory bottles have magnetic surprises inside to discover.  Other bottles just have fun Valentine's tidbits.

Let's make play-doh Valentine's together with our cinnamon sticks, heart cookie cutters, L-U-V letters, red glitter, and stampers.  <3  With such a beautiful set up, this table will surely be irresistible to our little love bugs!

New Year, New Look!

While the school friends have been with their families over Winter Break, Ms. Harmony has been busy giving a few of the Areas a makeover!  After hours of brainstorming, planning, shopping, building, and gathering materials, Ms. Harmony is very excited to share it all with the school friends.  One of the objectives of this makeover was to provide open-ended, curiosity-invoking, play provocations for the children by incorporating REAL or recycled materials.  Fewer lights, fewer electronic sounds, less plastic.

One tinker station in the Toy and Puzzle Area now houses an Asian tapestry, pitcher, vase, and statue.  While appreciating art and decor from another culture, the children will be invited to use tiny spoons to move gems between vases, pitchers, pots, and trays which serves to develop fine motor, mathematical, and socio-cultural abilities/knowledge.

The second tinker station has animals from the Arctic.  Children have opportunities to use spools, gems, rounds, blocks, and snowflakes to build an original setting and a story over and over again.  They also become familiar with the animals living in this region of the world, and might talk about the animal food chains, habitat preservation issues, behavior, and adaptations.

The Explore Table has been filled with rice, scoops, adapted scissors, polar animals, reusable ice cubes, and sequin balls.  This provocation is specifically designed to facilitate discussion about animal camouflage.  Finding the white furred animals in the white rice (AKA "snow") is difficult, both for school friends and for animal predators!

The Book and Block Areas have been updated to include comfy rugs, providing increased comfort for working on the floor and interesting textures in the room.  The Book Area also has new throw pillows and star lights, pictured here in the dark room to get the full effect!  :)  

Updates will likely continue during 2021 as we continue to move toward more authentic materials and experiences for the children.  This is just the beginning, and what a great beginning it is!

Christmas is Coming!

And we've been preparing to celebrate this holiday!  These are some of the ways we are getting ready for Christmas.  We like to use these village blocks and magnetic Christmas tree to create a complete Christmas village.  

We've engaged our senses with a variety of textured ornaments, Christmas ducks, finger puppets, chimney tubes, sparkly trees and gingerbread boys, and even cinnamon pinecones.  One of the most enjoyable results from this provocation is hearing the children invent stories about Santa going down the chimneys, snowball fights, gingerbread boys outrunning reindeer, and more.  Additionally, the children engaged their fine motor skills by threading fuzzy sticks through the ornaments and hung them on the Christmas tree.

We've worked with green and white paint at the art easel, determining what happens when these colors are mixed.  

One of the BEST part of the Christmas season is driving after dark and seeing the lights!  Night time field trips for preschoolers are impractical, so we turned off the lights and turned on our glow sticks to play with lights.

Some of our friends have become more interested in letters.  Ms. Harmony planned a Small Group activity where each child was given a large letter 'C' for Christmas with a pencil, a fuzzy stick, and a ball of play dough.  One friend in particular, loves the letter 'C' because it is the letter the starts her name!

The children were encouraged to trace the letter with their fingers or pencil.  We talked about how the letter 'C' has a curvy shape.  We tried to form this shape with the fuzzy sticks and/or play dough.

Some of our friends were even able to hear the /c/ sound that 'C' makes and thought of their own 'C' words: candy cane, Christmas tree, carols, and cookies!

Christmas is coming, and we are almost ready!  Songs, lights, smells, letters, and stories... so many ways to fully experience the joyous holiday.

Preschool Party Halloween Style

Do you want to know how we had the "BEST Halloween party EVER???"  Of course you do!  Harmony's House wants to share our spook-tacular ideas so you can have the most fun too!

Large boxes painted into haunted houses are super fun, especially when orange and black bandannas hang down from the roof!

Art should be done on an outstanding scale, with witches brooms, of course.

Don't let that spider out!  He's enormous!  Just throw your rings at him!  He might catch one or two!

Water beads, eyeballs, creepy critters, colanders, and ladles made the brew station a sensory sensation.  We made witch brew in different ways over and over again!

Believe it or not, "Screwing a Pumpkin" was a favorite activity that children returned to again and again.  Getting the screws in the pumpkin was a bit tricky, so Ms. Harmony prepped this activity by screwing all the screws in.  The children explored ways to turn the screw driver to make the screws go up or down.  Some children even got the screws all the way out!

Eat a book, or read one... whichever suits the little monster.  ;)

These blocks were filled with real bones from an opossum!  It was neat to combine them with mirror blocks, and talk with the children about what parts of the body each set of bones came from.

Play in the Vampire Lair, or the Mummy House, or the Witchy Woods!

And don't forget to trick or treat!

We appreciate all of the parental involvement in pulling this off!  We couldn't have done it without you!

 That's a wrap on how we party hard in the preschool!  <3