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!

Farms to Feast

Farms feed the world.  They are, quite simply, fundamental to our existence.  For some of the children at Harmony's House, farms are also the place that they live.  We have been exploring farming for several weeks this fall in a variety of ways.  This post will explain how the ideas about farming and food culminate in celebrating the harvest at Thanksgiving.

In September, we visited a small farm of one of our families to meet, care for, and understand where food like milk, meat, and eggs come from.

Some farms have only animals, only food, or both.  In October, we "worked" in a Farmer's Market in our House Area.  

The children would come to the market to buy produce that they could "take home" and make supper with.

When they ran out of food, they would go shopping again.  Eventually the food at the store ran out.  The children solved this problem by "calling the farmer" to make a delivery to the store.  

Whoever was pretending to be the farmer would have to check if the hens were laying, if the pumpkins were ripe, and when they'd be able to make a delivery.  We learned that farmers were important people because the stores would run out of food without them!

Now, in November we are preparing for Thanksgiving.  Most people in the U.S. celebrate Thanksgiving by sharing a feast with family and/or friends, just as pilgrims did centuries ago to express gratitude for a plentiful harvest.

The children are demonstrating their knowledge of farming that they have developed during September and October by working with farm animals and barns.  Farmers must take good care of the animals to have enough milk, butter, and eggs for all of the baking that happens during November and December.

They know that turkeys live on farms, and try to "catch a turkey" with these clever scissors in the Explore Table.  Turkey farmers are very busy this time of year getting ready for Thanksgiving!

They create their own miniature farms, deliver hay and water to the animals, and use the tractors to work in the fields with the plants.  It's time to harvest all the corn, apples, pumpkins, potatoes, and squash.

Finally, they use the grain, eggs, and butter from farms to run the Cookie Bakery.

Some friends work the mixers to make cookie dough.  Some bake the cookie dough on sheets.

Some friends work to frost the cookies, and box them up for sale.

This year, for the children at Harmony's House, Thanksgiving will mean being thankful to farmers who bring the meat, produce, and grains to our table for a feast!

Little Bit of Wild

Check out this fascinating caterpillar we found on the playground this week!  Within minutes of discovering this creature, we noticed and caught a walking stick insect on the back of a school friend!

Two creepy critter discoveries prompted a huge bug hunt on the playground.  We spent the rest of the time searching for and attempting to catch insects and a small spider.  (*All bugs were released at the end!*)  Even though the playground was dew covered and a bit muddy, this bug hunt made our trip outside to explore the little bit of wild worth it.  The children were intrigued, focused, and dedicated to finding more bugs!

In addition to studying the fauna, we also worked with water mills and Squig structures.  The suction cup ends of the Squigs provide an interesting building experience, especially with added buoyancy and adhesive effects of water.

Perhaps the Potato Head families were underestimated in their ability to attract preschool students!  These fun little guys have been a table choice outdoors for a few weeks now, and STILL bring almost every student to the table every time.

The children make different Potato Heads to represent people in their families.  They consider different body parts and are so proud of what they make.  The children want to photo document their creations and ask that the pictures be sent to their parents.  :)

Sometimes reading outside is just the best isn't it?  Unless rain prohibits it (water and books don't mix!), we always have a few readers take a seat on the benches to check out a book.

Finally, everybody loves to stretch their abilities by climbing steps and ladders, crawling through tunnels, and even balancing on the bosu ball.

We LOVE Outside Time at Harmony's House!  Being outdoors helps to mellow our moods, soothe our senses, stimulate our interest in life, earth, and physical science, sync our brains and bodies, and just HAVE FUN.  <3

Pets are Part of Families Too

Some of the families of Harmony's House have pets, and one family even has a parent who works with pets as a Dog Groomer!  When the children asked for the puppies and kitties to come back to the House Area, this seemed like the perfect time to make a Pet Salon.  

Check it out!  We have a waiting room for clients to hold their pets while they wait for the groomer to come get the animal.

The first stop for our stinky pups is the bathing station!  Our pets get top-notch treatment with a bubble bath and shampoo.  Then they need a quick towel down.

Next they need to move to the Styling Station.  The "groomers" can use toy blow dryers, brushes, clippers,  and bows to spruce up the pet's look!

Lastly, we have some pet crates (carriers) where pets wait for the client to come and pick them up.

We sure hope our school friends have a barking good time with our new House Area set up!

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!