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.

Create and Learn!

Our school friends have been expressing their creativity in so many ways!  It's amazing to see them build their brains in SOOO many wonderful ways!  One subject we talked about was "shades."  We started with blue paint, and then explored what happened when we added black and/or white paint to the blue.  We talked about how the blue would get darker, or lighter, but didn't change into a different color really.  Dark blue and light blue are shades of blue.  Each masterpiece of blue shades was truly a masterpiece!

 

We used balls and ramps to create different tracks.  It was so fun and educational to explore what happened when we changed the angle of the ramp by raising or lowering the end of the ramps.  The balls speed would change and we found natural ways to talk about force, gravity, height, and distance.

     

But sometimes the ramps made dog homes too.  :) Because open ended materials are useful that way!  Why not?

Our Explore Table has been filled with fuzzy sticks, dry noodles, and colanders.  We navigated fuzzy sticks through the holes, in and out, to make silly hats!

Friend "Alarm Clock" wondered why sometimes you could see the fuzzy sticks and sometimes you couldn't.  We noticed that if we threaded the fuzzy sticks from the outside of the bowl, versus the inside, the fuzzy stick would poke out the way she wanted.

Play offers so many opportunities for young children to talk about "big" ideas from art and physics, and practice "big" skills like threading and weaving.  It's no wonder that play is one of the fastest ways to learn new information and skills for children!

A-MUSE-ing Rocks

During July, we built on a student interest: rocks!  Each child at Harmony's House has a rock collection at home, so we brought that interest alive in the classroom as well.  One small group activity was to use magnifying glasses to study an assortment of rocks.

We talked about things that we noticed and recorded our observations for parents to appreciate.  Some of our rocks were geodes, cooling slowly after having lots of heat and pressure.  This made crystals form.  Some of our rocks were full of bubbles (holes), made by volcanoes.

Other rock samples were magnetic, and we found one other rock besides hematite that was also magnetic.  We found rocks that were flat (sandstone), rough (desert rose and scoria), and smooth (apache tears and agate).

Some of our rocks were special because they were fossils!  Fossils are rocks that are remnants of something that was once alive such as a plant or animal.  We know about dinosaurs because of fossils!  So we naturally played with dinosaurs too.

Our Explore Table was filled with kinetic sand, rocks, dinosaurs, and aquarium plants.  The wonderful thing about the kinetic sand was that it would show us how dinosaurs made tracks that could be preserved.  We could also pretend that a dinosaur was hatching from an egg.  Finally, we could bury a dinosaur and see how the body left prints behind.  Remnants of bones, eggs, tracks, and even dinosaur poop helps us learn about how dinosaurs lived long ago.

In the Art Area, we used toy dinosaur skeletons to again talk about fossils... but we also used them to see whether the dinosaur walked on two legs or four.  The prints turned out great!

No childhood can be considered complete without rocks and dinosaurs.  What a fun unit this has been for our miniature geologists!

School is Back with Some New Friends!

We kicked off our summer session last week, and it has been so exciting to have new friends to play with!  We played the "Friends and Neighbors" game where we examined different scenarios of friends in need, and decided how to help them.  This game was helpful in guiding our conversation to different emotions, and why the character felt sad, or frustrated, or hurt.

We played another game where we matched our friends' names with their letter links.  This helped us practice saying our friends' names, but also helped us to listen to the way the names sound... especially the beginning sound of the name.

But most of all, we practiced BEING a friend by playing with friends!  This is our 'S' for Summer explore table!  (Everything in here starts with the 's' sound: sand, sea shells, suns, stars, sandals, sun glasses, stamps, and spoons.)

Friend "Alarm Clock" collected all of the sun rings.  She showed her friends how to put them on her fingers, and helped her friends do the same.  It was pretty tricky for some of our younger friends to slip those suns on each finger without dropping any!

But it was also cool to have a handful of sunshine too!  One of the best things about playing with friends is that they introduce new ideas and new ways to play.  :)

We Get Wet!

There isn't such thing as bad weather at Harmony's House.  Just wrong clothes!  When you come to play here, remember we are an all-weather preschool and dress for the weather!  :)

Kids learn to have fun in all kinds of weather.  Isn't it wonderful not to require sunny days to be happy?  We practiced opening and closing our child-sized umbrellas.

We put on our rain gear: rain boots, rain suits or pants and rain coat, and umbrellas.  This helps keep our clothes (mostly) dry underneath.

Then we are ready to scoop, pour, measure, dump, float, sink, and splash with the best!

What can you do in the rain?  Hear it patter, feel it fall, catch a rain drop on your tongue, take a duck walk, catch a bowlful, make mud cookies, and stomp in those puddles!  Have fun this week in the wet, wet weather!

Easy Easter Exploration

Got some empty eggs and water?  You've got what you need to make this super easy, but fun, Easter explore table!

We used "nets" to try to catch, count, and name colors of our eggs.

We opened the eggs, filled them with the water, and watch it fall out like rain.

We pretended to crack the eggs and watch the water fall out like a real egg.  We collected them and put them in our Easter baskets to tromp around with.  Best of all, we had some serious springtime fun!