Don't be a Litterbug!

Fun idea for Earth Day. We always have a playground clean up complete with gloves because there are some yucky things they always manage to find. Then we do this craft. I will usually just use pieces of litter from our classroom so its not dirty :)

Blow off that hot air!

Here is an science and art lesson. One of our science units is about states of matter and we mostly talk about solids, liquids, and gases. In order to help students experience air I plopped down some paints and let them go to town and blow as hard as they could. I gave them very little instruction beyond blow the paint and keep it on the paper. Some of them really got into mixing the colors and it brought up such wonderful discussions.

A few tips.

Make sure your paint is watery so it will move around, but not too watery because then it will run off the page on onto your tables and floor...not that I would know anything about that. :)

Also try to get those little straws like they have a lunch for their milk. The thinner the straw the harder it is to blow. This is good because you want them to have to work at it.

Another handy tip I have is for how to dry painted paper. Since I have a limited amount of space I take a Styrofoam tray (I just used ones from the lunch room that the kids were done with) and cut paper to fit inside.

Depending on what you are doing you can have the kids paint with the paper already in the tray or place it in when they are done.

 Then just stack them up criss cross.

Painting with Bubble Wrap

Long time no see...Long time no blog?

 It's been hard for me to post here lately and read anything kindergarten related because I just needed a break from school. I left my job of six years, which was a lot harder then I thought it would be. I need to be working closer to home and so right now I'm in between jobs.

It's been very nerve wracking because the county I want to work on has posted ZERO jobs in elementary ed for the past two months. I know this because I have been checking every day (multiple times) I know it is partly due to the fact that they are still going through transfers and all that jazz, but waiting is hard. It's hard to go through Target and see the sale on glue sticks and not buy any.

But anyway, I've been keeping myself busy at home cleaning out some areas of my house that desperately needed it and I was cleaning up my computer and found some pictures of things that I did over the spring with my students.

This is from Valentine's Day, but you could do this project anytime. Last year our art teacher, who we only see 3 times a year :( , did this more free form with the kids. I adapted it for hearts for a valentine measuring project, but you could really do any shape you wanted to.

1. Collect different sized bubble wrap (large bubbles, small bubbles, etc.) and cut them down to individual pieces for the kids. Roughly the size of a piece of 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. Tape the bubble wrap to the table.

2. Have the students paint the bubble wrap and then make a print. I let them switch for different colors and different sized bubbles.

3. Let the paper dry and then have them trace their shape on the back. Then they can cut it out their shape. I purposely gave students different sized hearts since this was going to be a measuring activity. (Look its differentiated!)

4. I had my students measure with nonstandard units. I ended up putting these on the bulletin board put I have no pictures of that. They glued them to a sentence frame that said "I used _____  cubes to measure my heart." Some of my more advanced students got to pick their unit of measurement so their frame looked like this " I used ____   _______ to measure my heart."

Thinking back now you could do this with a shapes unit so you could review 2D shapes (K.G.2) and have them use a paper big enough that they could trace two object and then compare (K.MD.2).

Reasons I love shaving cream

1. Easy clean up.

2. Cheap (especially when the teacher who had this room before me left 4 cans of it under the sink)

3. It makes my room smell clean.

4. It makes that last 30 minutes on a Friday when the kids can't sit still anymore because they have been stuck inside for the past few days and I've been giving them tons of busy work while testing for the end of the quarter just fly by.

5. Students can get that great sensory experience and fine motor practice ....(cough cough ok my principal is gone)...they get to play!

6. One of your students might say "This is my favoritest day ever!"

P is for Penguin

I started this post last month and then my laptop decided it didn't want to work. I know that everyone has moved on from winter but i thought i'd put the up anyway.

I saw these cute penguins on Keen on Kindergarten and since we happened to be studying P last week I thought it would be a fun project and a great assessment of motor skills.While making them a couple of kids kept asking about feet and so I just gave them some orange paper and let them go to town.

Reindeer Hats

A coworker made these with her kids and I took the idea. It made for good fine motor practice when they had to trace their hands and cut them out.

We did this project the last day before break so I only had a chance to grab a quick picture on my phone.