The second half of October was just as busy as the first. The children love to fill each moment with excitement! What could be more exciting than a trip to the pumpkin patch, creating a pumpkin patch at school with corn stalks, hay bales, and pumpkins, creating a scarecrow, baking and eating pumpkin seeds, carving jacko lanterns, exploring sensory with pumpkins, dressing up, and trick-or-treating?! Yes, we did all of this -- and may be even more -- just in a matter of two weeks!
Pumpkin Patch Field Trip...
The cheesy moment...
Hay ride...
The beautiful flower field, sometimes known as a "flower rug" because of its woven texture...
Getting set for the train ride...
All aboard the choo choo train...
The movie show where we learned about the pumpkin's growth cycle...
Bee maze...friends loved to touch and feel the big boards and asked us to read every word on it :)
We also checked out some cool corn hair in different colors. Who knew there could be so much variety in one crop? Friends were making hypothesizes as to why one is gold and the other reddish and some both...
Going through the pumpkin-picking rules and learning the right way to hold it...
Whooooa!!! The hay jump was a hit. Even I tried it once and it was super fun! Just imagine the fun they had!
What a Perfect timing to work on letter P...
Collaging letter P with Puzzle Pieces and Poms Poms after Painting it with glue...
Love the way friends had their unique styles and put their knowledge of colors, patterns, space, and materials to use!
Friends got involved into Painting huge circle of Paper which turned out to be an entire different Project than what we had originally thought of. As you read in a previous blog, they became snowpeople in October!
They decorated the painted one as a boy snowman and...
...this one as girl snowman. The documentation for this work is up on our classroom windows.
Friends also decorated gourds...
After we finished the pulling out seeds from the pumpkin and washing it, with supervision some friends confidently tried the pumpkin cutter tool to learn how it works...
It was fun to explore the cool pumpkin with warts/popcorn bumps. It was a different texture. Some friends described it as bumping bump, some loved touching it, while some said, "eeeeekk!" We talked about respecting preferences/choices, and that it is great that they all tried feeling it at least once to know what they think about it.
Soon we ended making popcorn pumpkins as the children said they could use popcorn to make it feel just like the real one above. So we added some orange food color and dark corn syrup to bring the color and bind it. Later friends added the brown pretzel stem and the green twizzlers as leaf to add details!
Later friends made 3 dimensional structures using the colored rice-foam Packing Peanuts. They used a little water to stick the pieces together to make different creations...
Further for letter P, friends loved doing the acrylic Painting on canvas...
We enjoyed our cooking project of baking Pumpkin Pie...
And of course eating it...
...and licking it to the last crumb :) :)
Science through experimentation...
What else could be a better way to learn science than experiments...
Here we learned about dissolving. Four liquids - water, milk, oil, and vinegar, were put to test and friends added hypothesis whether the pumpkin candies will dissolve in or not...
The experiment lasted for three days and the findings were based on our observations.
We found that they dissolved/ disintegrated in all the liquids with time variations except for oil where the candies didn't budge; they stayed intact even after three days. We read a bit about the properties of these liquids and friends brainstormed what they already know about oil water milk and vinegar.
Halloween fun with icy gloves...
Friends filled disposable gloves with water and their choice of color and even added bugs, eyeballs, and other fun stuff inside the glove. We put them in the freezer and the next day...
We ripped the gloves off to see a frozen hand with spooky things inside. Now they had to work on taking out those things. They used different techniques -- hammering, water droppers, or just waiting for the ice to melt..friends were even trying to keep a track of how long it took for their ice to melt for their treasure to come out.
Almost getting there.. We saw ice melt into water. Some children tried using droppers to drip the melted water over the ice to make it melt faster. We had mixed opinions about whether it helped, but it was fun to try and good fine motor practice along the way.
Another experiment was about gas expansion. When we put vinegar and baking soda in a Ziploc bag, the bag blew bigger and the locks opened when the bag couldn't hold the pressure of the gases inside. It all foamed out!
Dancing raisins in sparking soda water was also fun to watch. When we poured the soda water over the raisins, they plumped up and floated up. In a while they sank down, then again they floated up. As a result we called them dancing raisins. Here we talked about density, weight, and sinking vs. floating.
One of our friend J got a pack of raisin that day for lunch. Guess what...he performed the same experiment all by himself in a glass of water, but with different results. It was a learning moment as we talked through our raisin experiment again.
Other activities included working with magnets where friends made letters and their names with magnetic cards and other metal materials...
Structures with magnets...
Painting on tortillas...
Exploring evaporation of water...
November comes in with new projects in hand. We're excited to see what comes next!
Hugs,
Teacher Rashida.
