This new year started with the same excitement and our children were still thriving with the regular routine schedules. We continued to work with our letter of the week and they continued to enjoy exploring words and making things that begin with that letter!
Letter J...
Making strawberry Jello by stirring the crystals in warm water...
Seeing the transformation of liquid settled into a jiggly jaggly jelly after cooling!
Feeling the texture with our skin and enjoying the taste on our buds :)
Children were excited to make jelly fishes when that word was called out. For most of them jelly fishes were transparent. As a result, we decided to go transparent and used these plastic bowls and plates to color our fishes...
We later placed the bowls over the plates and melted them in the oven while friends worked with making the colorful tentacles using ribbons, strings, and bubble wrap. They tied all of these tentacle materials with a pipe cleaner.
D pretending to swim her fish by shaking its tentacles...
We also worked on a big jelly fish as a class project. We used a fan and decorated it and worked our way similarly to make tentacles.
Our personal jelly fishes have been displayed in the class and indeed they add to the beauty of our classroom!
Letter Z...
We collated our letter Z with the idea of a Zebra in mind.
We got our black stripes, black yarn to make hair and tail, and google eyes to complete our animal craft.
L transferred his idea of hair on the top and tail on the bottom onto his zebra collage and spatially nailed it!
Friends also created a Zoo for their chosen animals...
L worked to create a habitat for the horses and also provided them some green grass to eat and care for :)
While L was busy with his dinosaur Zoo! He even added penguins sleeping on their backs and said that they were making snow angels :) :)
On the other end, L had an entirely different idea with the play dough. He used it as a wall and stuck the dinosaur in. When he took the dinosaur out he was amazed to see the entire bone structure imprint left behind! He continued to make many such more and friends were excited to see his cool way!
Later during the week, we made delicious Zucchini bread with teacher Jasmine.
One of the highlights of the week was doing the egg sucking experiment!
We introduced the materials and discussed about the procedure. We made our own guesses as to whether or not the egg will be sucked in by the bottle. The final step was putting it into practice. We lit the matchsticks and dropped them in quickly and placed the egg on the bottle. Slowly slowly we could see the egg move. Finally when all the steps were done, we jumped out of joy to see the not the entire egg but the egg yolk and the bottom part of the egg sucked in. Ahhh! We were not yet pleased. Our goal was to see the entire egg sucked in. So as great scientist, we did not give up!
Friends feeling the hard boiled egg!
The egg starting to get pulled down 8-)
We tried another glass bottle with a different bottle neck. Working towards all our steps, finally the egg was sucked in completely within a few seconds and without a crack. Btw, we even made a smiley face on the egg before the bottle could suck it in :) friends enjoyed that part and our success was celebrated with great excitement!
There we see the entire egg in there. Here we were trying the reverse experiment to now take it out. We tried hard, but failed on this one :( However, the success was so much in mind that nobody worried about this failure :)
Finally, we culminated with the discussion of the results and our hypothesis. Further to confess, we did this experiment for more than 15 times that took us around 45 minutes to reach the success level. Have to compliment that friends were so patient and awaiting to see the results. Additionally, What we learned out of this entire experiment was not to give up and how experiments take a lot of trials until we reach a result and prove our hypothesis. Bravo! What an accomplishment!
Outdoors...
This week there was a lot going outdoors or should I say we had a chance to notice all the little fun that children were sharing amongst themselves.
Girls were making a TEAM TRAIN, and enjoying their journey together!
Friends are getting so much better at blowing bubbles!
The boat was totally occupied and busy with a lot of 'HO HO CAPTAIN' play :)
These boys had a different plan in mind when the sand boat was already in use by other friends. They problem solved their way and played with this basket ball hoop instead pretending it to be their pirate ship with the red hoop as their steering wheel!
Soccer gets its new face. L discovered a game where the player goals from outside and the goalie is inside the playhouse. There were huge laughters when this 'not visible' goalie kicked the ball from inside and the player continued to aim at the goal again :)
Other activities friends loved during the two weeks...
Working with rocks...
Some friends lined them up, stacked them...
...while others worked on number 6 :)
One of the favorite girls activity was making purses out of duct tapes with a plastic lining...
Now these duct tapes are tricky. They stick onto each other very quickly messing up our ideas of laying them down perfectly. But, our friends put their best fine motor skills out there, and with a little help kept nailing it down in little parts...
D's ongoing work...
S' purse is ready and she is ready too to go shopping!
K's choice of her bag!
Working with colored transparent pieces at the light table and seeing some shades of new colors!
Lego table was very well used to use their power of imagination transform into animated structures.
Overall, the first two weeks of this new year bought us many creative treats and we are prepared to soak up much more that this beautiful year had to offer at Creative Minds!
See you'll around,
Hugs,
Teacher Rashida.
