5 Ideas for Spring Sensory Bottles

Sensory bottles are mesmerizing and fun!  Here's our most recent collection at Harmony's House.

1.  Golden sun- add one bottle of gold glitter glue, a few pebbles to aid mixing, and warm water.  Shake and watch the glitter swirl and move.  Spring comes with more sunlight and warmer days!

2.  Rainbow spots- add multiple colors of water beads, just a sprinkle of each color to water.  (We left air in the top of this bottle to allow for better swirling.  Instead of shaking this bottle, swirl it around like a tornado and watch the rainbow spin!)  Spring brings out the colors in the world.

3.  Bug safari- fill the bottle half full with rainbow rice and add a few toys insects.  (We used small bug erasers.)  Shake up the rice, roll the bottle around, and find the bugs!  We counted four butterflies, dragonflies, ladybugs, and bees hiding.  Springs wakens the insect life!

4.  Blue skies and glitter rain- add one bottle of blue glitter glue, purple beads, chunky iridescent glitter, and water.  The beads help the glitter mix better but can also be observed falling slowly through the solution.  Some glitter floats up, some glitter sinks, just like water moves between the Earth and sky in the water cycle.  April showers bring May flowers.

5.  May flowers-  trim desired silk flowers and leaves, add flat beads as you fill with flowers, and push down with a straw to pack the flowers into the bottle to reach desired fill.  The beads move around the flowers with a rainstick sound, but they also look like beautiful jewels hiding in the flowers.  Flowers are some of the best parts of Spring!

Why is it Winter? SPACE holds the answer!

In following Friend "Sandwich's" zest for Space learning, we built a unit all about space!  And we connected it with our prior unit about winter.  Winter on Earth looks cold and bare.  Trees are sleeping and their leaves have fallen, sometimes it snows, and we have to wear extra clothes to keep warm.  Winter in space looks like Earth tilting, or leaning, away from the Sun's warmth.

We have worked in our Explore table (pictured above) to learn names of planets, "catch stars," and taking samples of space rocks with "rovers."

We built, and rebuilt, our own rovers.  Their job is to take pictures, rock samples, and other information while exploring the moon or Mars.  We read about rovers in a book, and then used our imaginations to take ours on space expeditions.

At the Alone Table, we used stars to make pictures, or constellations.  We also had a Galaxy bottle to shake up and watch the shooting stars.

This bottle is 1/2 mineral oil, purple and blue glitter, and 1/2 water with blue and red dye.  Shake it up and watch the magic happen!

Space is art-mazing!  We used foil, star stickers, and glue to make these space pictures.  Our dialogue went beyond the practical process of the art (peeling stickers, squeezing glue, ripping or crunching foil): we discussed nebulae where stars are born, asteroids "the space rocks," and constellations.

Astronomy is such a vast topic, and there is so much to do with preschoolers on the subject!  Winter is a perfect time to study space.

Happy New Year! We're Back!

We are kicking off the Spring 2020 semester right!  Our new explore table is filled with rice, pom poms, glitter balls, scissor catchers, and scoops!

We've been exploring cars, ramps, roads, and races too!

And our Alone Table work is fascinating on the light box!  Each child had fun building with the transparent legos, "snowballs," and animal figurines.  Winter is such a fun time of year at Harmony's House!  Welcome back friends.  :)

5 Christmas Math Ideas for Preschool

1.  Spatial awareness- Use cookie cutters to explore size and shape.  *Bonus* The child can count the number of "cookies" made in the dough!

2.  Shapes, size, and counting- Use different shaped Christmas boxes and tins to fill and dump with bows, cotton balls (snow balls), and jingle bells.  How many bows fit in the square box?  Will the biggest jingle bell fit in the biggest box?

3. Number recognition and sequencing- Cut "light bulbs" from craft foam and use a permanent marker to write numbers on each one.  Challenge the children to toss the "light bulbs" and then organize them back in the correct order.

4.  Sorting and matching- Find the matching ornaments and Christmas ducks.  Sort matching objects into groups.

5.  Find the number- Invite the child to look under ornaments on this Christmas tree to find the correct number.  Locate where smaller numbers are on the tree, and where larger numbers are on the tree.  Count up from one to twenty-four.

Most of all, have FUN!  Preschool math rocks, and is super easy to bring into your classroom!

Fun with Fall Work Time Plans

During October, we've worked with learning to name forest animals and various ways that they are getting ready for winter.  This Alone Table plan was a super way to help us remember which animals live in our local forests and develop understanding of size as well!  The Russian Doll style of toy challenged the school friends to put the animals in size order to correctly nest them.

We also mixed yellow with red paint to make orange.  Even basic art experiences like this are amazing to young children, which supports the idea that art does not need to be complicated to be educational and fun!

This day the children decided to stack the log blocks as high as they could go before they toppled!  Ms. Harmony supported this play by describing the blocks that they were choosing to use: large or small, heavy or light, flat or round, etc. as the children experimented with the best way to build.  At key opportunities, she would ask questions like, "So when we put the heavier blocks on top, the tower fell.  What should we change?" or "What happens if you turn this Y-shaped log upside down?"  The children did the work, did the thinking, and worked through the trial and error experience.  Not only did they develop greater understanding for gravity, balance, and weight, but also they were challenged to sustain attention and tolerate frustration as they practiced the scientific process of identifying a problem, having an idea to solve it, testing it, and reflecting on the results.

Did you know that some of the animals are better climbers than others?  After building the tower, the soft toy animals like Fox, Deer, Bear, Raccoon, and Mountain Lion pretended to climb the tower that the children made.  Ms. Harmony voiced Deer and asked the children to help her solve the problem of reaching the top since Deer wasn't great at climbing trees.  Deer is good at running and jumping.  The school friends built stairs for Deer so she could play too, although it's fun to pretend that Deer can fly too.  ;)

Happy Halloween is in the Explore Table!  We've stacked pumpkins, made skeleton stories, studied the movements of slinkies, filled cauldrons with beans and eyeballs, and SO MUCH MORE.  This is such a fun way to talk about the things we see at Halloween time.  :)

All in all, the children have certainly been BUSY!  It's so fun to build on THEIR ideas and see them learn through play.

Music, Meals, and Monsters

The instruments have been a huge hit with the new class.  One starts playing, Ms. Harmony starts singing, and soon everyone is sitting around playing keys, shaking maracas, or tapping a tune!

The "popcorn piano" is especially popular.  When you push the keys, in addition to playing a sound, the "popcorn" pops up inside the instrument!  Friend "Sandwich" patiently waited for his turn at the Alone Table to play it.

For young preschoolers and toddlers, joining/working a collaborative plan is developmentally challenging!  This week we worked more with this objective by:

• asking to join a friend by saying, "Can I play too?"
• inviting a friend to join by saying, "Do you want to play with me?"
• Ms. Harmony modeled both through play via the Duplo Lego people and invited the children to "talk back" with a person

In the plan featured here, we used the log blocks to make a table, chairs, booster seats, etc. and helped all the Lego people sit down.  Friend "Sheep" suggested we serve cupcakes.  We realized we didn't have any cupcakes so we used a bristle block instead.  We helped our Lego people sing "Happy Birthday" and the school friends chimed in.  They helped their person "eat."

This was a great opportunity to practice playing together, and most of our friends contributed to the plan in a productive way by building, "talking" through a Lego person, or helping the Lego person to "eat."  Over the course of the year, Ms. Harmony will facilitate these spontaneous group plans less and less as the children do them independently more and more.

Including the Bristle Blocks into the plan prompted more building.  Friends "Sheep" and "Sandwich" both experimented with using the bristle blocks to make cars, cakes, and especially monsters!  Here's Friend "Sandwich's" Monster Man!

Working with Safari Animals

Teachers like lesson plans.  And a lot of preschool teachers like themed lesson plans.  It helps the teachers feel like they've "covered all the bases" academically speaking, and to some extent, there is value in this.  Themes allow teachers to bring ideas into the classroom that the children might be experiencing (e.g. going to kindergarten soon, worrying about thunderstorms), want to learn more about (e.g. specific community helpers or animals), or help them to notice something that they otherwise wouldn't (e.g. how shadows change relative to light sources).  Making plans relating to these themes allow teachers to tick off academic skills or material that they want to teach.

But it is also just as important, or even more so, to acknowledge the value in the free play that happens during the children's Work Time.  This work that the children pursue of their own agendas can be just as academic, noteworthy, and developmentally productive as what the teacher has planned for Small Group and Circle Time lessons.  For this reason, this post is dedicated completely to the Work Time plans of the children.  

Yes, the theme that we've been talking about lately has related to grassland animals from Africa (in case the school friends have any zoo trips this summer with their families!), and so the toys provided relate to that... but how they are used is totally up to the school friends.  And, in Work Time, the teacher can discover more interests that the children have.  Working those "academics" into the plans of the children and using the children's ideas for future lesson plans can be the best way to help the children embrace new material in the future.