Another week has come and gone, and the cooler weather seems to be here for good. We have embraced the fall weather and we are bringing that inspiration into the classroom. Take a look at what we have been up to:
Our students have had an obsession with potato bugs this year (they are also called roly-polies, or pill bugs). They find them in the dirt under the trees in our kindergarten pen and pick them up and let them crawl all over their arms. We took a few inside, put them in a bug container and did a lot of research on them (what they eat, why they go into a ball, how they sleep, how many legs they have… they had a lot of questions!). Once we learned all about them, we put out this invitation to create. We allowed the students to create a bug with the loose parts any way they wanted. Then we took a picture of their creation, and a quote about what they learned. We added this to their science notebooks as their assessment. All their bugs came out looking so different, and they really learned a lot (“they have teeth for eating, not for biting people”, “when they’re scared they roll into a ball, like armour”, “they breathe from under their bodies with their gills”). I love how this center brought together their scientific thinking and creative skills!
Students love a good sensory bin. We have been changing it up every week, and they always gravitate towards it. They are excited to see what the new center is going to be, and this one was no exception. The dried green and yellow split peas are a great sensory filler; they are inexpensive to buy and they can be reused again and again. Students love the feel of it, and you can add so many things to it. For this one, we were inspired by the changing season and we had fall items in it. You can see more about it in this blog post, and get inspired to create your own autumn sensory bin!
Our next sensory bin is full of Halloween goodies! The filler is died rice and bow tie pasta. Then we just added all kinds of Halloween items from the dollar store (erasers, eyeballs, bats, skeletons, fingers, bugs). We hoped to inspire them to sort the items in different ways (type, colour, size, etc), and we did notice a lot of this going on! We were able to name the learning that we saw happen, and got the students discussing how they were going to sort the items. It worked!
Our fine motor table was set up with these pipe cleaner trees and an invitation to add button ‘leaves’ to the branches. I was able to use Plasticine to keep them upright and it worked perfectly. Students love this activity, and they are doing a great job keeping them intact (I am pleasantly surprised). It is great for working their fine motor muscles, and they just love placing them on the branches.
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