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!

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!

This Road was Built in a Day, and Another One on the Next

In February, we have been learning about various careers.  Part of our work has been using these giant wooden blocks to build... roads, castles, hospitals... whatever the children imagine!

We have talked about what bulldozers, cement mixers, and dump trucks are useful for.

We have tested the durability of our structures.

We have revised and rebuilt in true engineering and constructing form!

We have even worked in a small world construction site moving rocks, logs, and dirt (beans).

We honed our fine motor skills by learning how to hold a nail (golf tee) and hammer.

It wasn't easy, and took a lot of practice.  We persisted and learned something new!

Friend "Sandwich" even learned how to use the claw side of the hammer to remove his nails!  What a thorough introduction of construction, carpentry, and engineering.  More careers to come...

Waffles Anyone?

When Baby "E" turned one, she was given this little waffle block set with animals.  She loves carrying around the animals, but the school friends have loved using the waffles as building materials.  They are amazing!  Easy to use, conducive to imaginative play, and SO fun!

At "E's" birthday party, the school friends opened the box and said, "Wow!  These are just like the blocks in your yard but tiny!"  So true!  But also, these have more kinds of shapes, including circles and rods, that are cleverly planned out to be compatible with the other pieces.

Today, Friend "Sandwich" literally worked to make this "playground" for 30 minutes.  He designed it to be an obstacle course for the people included with the toy.  He assigned voices to his figures, and helped them "race" through the obstacle course.  Then he decided it would be a "video game" where he held the pretend controller to push imaginary buttons, and Ms. Harmony guided the players through the course where they received medals at the end.

We had ladders to climb, merry-go-rounds to spin, slides to descend, climbers to leap on and off of, and more.  It was truly amazing to spend a solid 30 minutes on a single plan... and the only reason we stopped working on this was because it was time to carry on with the day.  I'd say this was waffles for the win!

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.

Finding Fall?

The forest animals are going to start getting ready for winter soon!  One of the best ways to spot forest animals is by going camping.  We made a cool tent in the Book Area, stocked up on flashlights, and made animal dens.  So cool!

We hid animals around the room and used binoculars or flashlights to find them.  Bears make sure to eat lots of food during the summer and fall to prepare for winter.

Deer are busy eating too.  Food is hard to find in the winter.

Friend "Sandwich" asked, "Which pinecone is the spikiest?"  Great question!  He and Toddler "Koala" tested them out and then used them to make some animal dens.

Flashlights are also great for helping you find your belly button... in case yours is missing.  ;)

Exploring Desert Life

The desert is near and dear for Ms. Harmony as she grew up in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona!  She shared just a bit of this experience with the school friends in late July this year.

In studying reptiles, we talked about these animals having scaly bodies like fish... but they are different because they don't have any gills!  They don't live in the water.  We painted on the bubble wrap-covered easel and stamped papers shaped like snakes on the wet paint.

Friend "Hammer" has been wanting to do Marble Works all summer!  We made snake-slides for our marbles and it was so neat to send marbles down these twists and turns.  The school friends were given a few pieces of track at a time and asked to connect them and see how the marbles moved through the channels.  They worked through the trial and error process of learning about gravity, obstacles, gaps, slopes, and more.

In the desert, there are animals that can be hot and thirsty because it doesn't rain very much.  Saguaro cacti are plants that are ONLY found in the Sonoran Desert of the southwest.  They are covered in prickly spines to protect them from hungry animals, but there are some animals who build homes in the cacti anyways.  :)  After reading some books with real pictures of saguaros, prickly pear, and organ pipe cacti, we used play-doh and half-toothpicks to make our own cacti.  Together, it made an adorable cactus garden.