Fun Filled Friday

Friday, February 15

Our Friday Morning began quietly as the children slowly arrived ready to begin their day. Many explored in the sandbox, using some of our recycled sculpture materials as containers to fill and dump, creating hands-on experiences with volume, measurement and other beginning math concepts.

 The block area welcomed the return of Carlos, Xander, Samuel and Jayden, with other Cardinals visiting throughout the day, as they added to a structure started yesterday. 

Another invitation for the children was watercolors. This art experience allows the children  the opportunity to display their creativity as they use their fine motor skills in delicately moving the smaller paintbrush across the paper. Attention to detail and patience were both displayed at this center as the children practiced drawing faces, making oceans, and created other scenes as gifts to their friends. The bonds between the children are growing every day as they find little ways to express kindness such as this.

The Science center also proved to be a popular stop this morning. It began when Stella asked, "Would anyone like to do science with me?". A group of Cardinals came over and watched closely as Stella demonstrated investigation skills by using a magnifying glass to observe a rock. The Cardinals at this center began reciting science terms such as rock, mineral and diamond. They continue to expand their knowledge of properties of matter as they compare and contrast the different objects in this area depending on color, texture, size, weight and other physical attributes. 

Meanwhile, another group of children worked alongside friends in the block area, constructing a connected track layout. They aligned the tracks to form a path and began discussing how long or short the pieces were. In the construction process, the children demonstrated emerging math skills such as measuring, comparing and contrasting length, and sorting the types of tracks.

As we settled into our morning together, we gathered for our meeting on the rug. We began with our moment of silence and welcomed each friend to school with our Good Morning Song.  After our intriguing conversation about shapes yesterday, the children were introduced to a new way to explore shapes. We began by reviewing the number of sides that each shape has and looked at pictures of the shapes in the Shape Book. Then, marshmallows and toothpicks were displayed as tools to assemble the different shapes we see all around us. We discussed how the toothpicks were the straight sides and the marshmallows would help us in the connecting of the sides! The children eagerly identified how many of each material they would need depending on the shape they wanted to create. This "Marshmallow Math" center was a place that all the children wanted to visit. After some exploration with creating shapes at the center, some children continued to work on more elaborate 3-D structures with the materials. As they worked, the children were excited to point out the shapes they could see in their creations. Of course, we were also excited to eat a few of the marshmallows as well! Invite your child to identify what shape he/she created, what it looks like, how many sides it has and what other things in the world around us are that shape.

We continued our discovering as we spent the rest of our day in our outdoor space. The beautiful weather set the stage for the children to freely explore in their areas of interest. Looking in, you can see the dance parties, sand digging, building, and imaginative play all happening in small groups spread out throughout the area.

Enjoy the three day weekend, as we have off for President's Day on Monday. We look forward to seeing everyone back at school on Tuesday!