fine motor rainbow play

This was one of the magical ideas that came to me as I was running out the door to sub a preschool class last summer. Back then I used a couple of oh-so-lovely toilet paper tubes which only kinda worked as the bands were to springy and powerful the tubes got quite a bit wonky. This time I grabbed a cylinder block and set it up at our fine motor table to see what would happen.

I teach threes and this was a tricky project for them to tackle. I need to find a way to give the cylinder some staying power...maybe I should glue it to a board. The slipperyness of the cylinder caused a lot of frustration for my students. Some tried once and then abandoned it after the third hair holder flew across the room. That in itself was super delightful to the kiddos. Some gathered up all the holders and stretched them over their own arms to create bracelets. One of them, this one, worked and worked and worked, exclaiming when it got tricky (her words not mine) but persevering until she got one of each color carefully placed around the cylinder. 

 

I love the look of this project and how it creates an activity to use those fine motors and to problem solve. I will definitely do this again next year. 

investigating plants and flowers

This project and center came about when we were studying plants, flowers, and sequencing. You can see that our sunflowers had begun sprouting in their egg cartons. The children were really excited about that and it gave us an opportunity to talk about the parts of a plant. I had previously left the sprouts out so that my co-teachers could help me keep and eye out and water them when I was not there. By co-teachers, I mean we share a room. There are three of us in the room and three separate classes. Two of our classes run with the same themes and book titles while the third is a camp class of sorts and is always full of fun happenings. Our Friday teacher set this up on our science table thinking we would like to do this with our kiddos as well and she was totally right. Since it was also our week of A Rainbow of My Own, I swapped out the trays or rainbow colors and added our polka tray in the center to hold the parts. I brought in flowers from my garden at home and culled from the leftover plants we had from the previous week and set them out to for the kiddos to explore.

We talked about the parts of the plants and went through the various names as each child selected something from the polka dot tray. On our tray, was an assortment of the renegade bean plants that sprout when we "accidentally" leave black beans in the sand box after sensory play. One of the kiddos totally made the connection and insisted on going outside to harvest the remaining plants. Of course this led to others wanting to plant more so out came the tub of black beans as the children carefully planted them in our sandbox.