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!

SPOOKY Science and Art!

Halloween season is such a fun time to sneak in amazing science opportunities.  This week we did some simple science as we pretended to be witches making potions!  Instead of dark cauldrons, I provided the children with clear jugs or bowls because I wanted them to see the chemical reactions and material densities easily.

The children were challenged to pick up fake creepy crawlies with tweezers.  We noticed that these buggers sank right to the bottom even if we stirred them up.  We described them as being heavier than the water.

We used spoons to try to pick up the bouncy ball eyeballs and discovered these would float even after being in the water for a long time and being pushed to the bottom.  We decided that they must be lighter than water.

What made this project extra fun was crumbling up Alka-selzer tablets and dropping them in the water to see the "brew" fizz and make tiny bubbles.

And, just because it's fun to be imaginative, we talked about what we would do with our potions if we were truly magical!  Would you want to make a growing potion???  Or turn into a frog???  What would you do if you could?

We also made magnificent masterpieces with paint, glitter, googly eyes, and yarn.

These are monsters you see, and every monster is different!  You can't do this art wrong.  :)

Our monsters each were wonderful in unique ways, and it was fun to think of ways to describe our own monster's colors, body shape, number or placements of eyes, personality, and hair style.  The final product will be displayed near the preschool entrance for parental viewing pleasure!

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

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!

Tips for Tie-Dyeing with Preschoolers

Summer isn't summer at Harmony's House without making new tie-dye t-shirts.  :)  We did this project inside this year with four children ages 20 months to 3 1/2 years.  It sounds like a recipe for disaster, or at least a huge mess!  But it wasn't.  Ms. Harmony did a few things to prepare for the activity that made this potential mess into an easy-breezy-totally-fun project!

Tip 1:  cover the entire table with trash bags or cheap dollar tree table clothes, including using packing tape to close the seams of overlapping edges.

Tip 2: show the children options for the t-shirt designs in advance and ask them to choose one that they like: swirl, stripes, bulls-eye, etc.

Tip 3:  Prep the shirts according to the children's preference.  Do a cold rinse and spin in the washing machine.  Scrunch, roll, shape, etc. the shirt and apply the rubber bands.  Place the damp shirt in a small ziplock bag with the child's name on it.

Tip 4:  Choose three or four colors of dye and make them up before the activity.  Estimate the amount of dye you will need, but have an extra bottle or two on hand just in case you run out mid-project.

Tip 5: When leading the activity, only work on one shirt at a time.  Usually the other children enjoy watching the dyeing process, but they can go play elsewhere until it is their turn to dye their shirt.

Tip 6:  Lay a small sheet of saran wrap under the shirt before allowing the child to squirt the dye on the segments of the shirt.  After each section has been dyed, wrap the saran wrap around the shirt and put it back in the ziplock bag.  Send the bag home with instructions for the parents on how to wash/care for the shirt.

Have so much fun seeing how everyone's shirts the following school day!