Pine Cone Turkeys

A few weeks ago I was taking a walk and found a whole bunch of pine cones that had fallen from a tree onto the sidewalk about a block from the school. Later in the day, I went back with some of the children to gather up the pine cones. At the time I didn't have a plan for them but I was sure they would come in handy with the holidays coming up.

Today, we used some of the pine cones to make Thanksgiving turkeys. I showed the children how to squeeze some glue onto them and tuck feathers into the pine cones.

Then we added eyes and a little piece of orange pipe cleaner as a beak.

Aren't they cute!

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What Will the Ants Eat?

Last week we found a whole bunch of pill bugs under some rocks in our playground, and ever since then the class has been all about bugs. Every time we go outside we turn over all of the rocks to look for bugs, though the bugs seem to have learned their lesson as we never find them under the rocks anymore.

 

Still, we look for bugs outside every day and yesterday we found some ants marching around looking for food. We wondered what kind of food the ants would like to eat and decided to find out. I put together bits of random food that we had in the classroom to make an ant food platter.

Before taking it outside, the children predicted what they thought the ants would eat. Then we took the ant food platter to the spot where the ants were crawling around. We took everything off the plate, except for the honey, and put the food in different spots around the ants.

After watching for a few minutes, the children realized that the ants weren't going to start eating right away, so they went off to do other things. Every few minutes someone would check on the ants to see if they had started eating yet. After about ten minutes one little ant found the apple slice.

Everyone was very excited! As we watched, the ants also found the goldfish and the honey.

We left the food out during nap time and came back to look at it in the afternoon. It turned it that once the ants found the honey, they forgot about the other food and all starting feasting on the delicious, sweet honey.

I printed out a picture of the food we had put out and typed up the predictions the children had made before the activity, and hung both in the science center. I also wrote down the outcome of the experiment. The children kept coming to the center to "read" about the experiment. They were also very excited to show it to their parents later in the day.

 

This experiment made such an impression that the children started talking about it again first thing this morning. So I came up with this art project to go along with the science project.

I made paper cut-outs of the foods we gave to the ants and let the children glue them onto construction paper. Then I gave them black paint and showed them how to make fingerprint ants. It didn't matter that the pictures weren't exactly accurate. What is important is that the class was learning about the scientific process by making predictions, experimenting, and recording their findings!

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Building Bird Nests

This week our class has been interested in birds. On Wednesday we watched a video of a bird building a nest and talked about what birds' nests are made of. We talked about how birds collect twigs, leaves, and other things to use for their nests. When we went outside, we pretended we were all birds and collected lots of small sticks. Then I gave the children paper and glue...

and they set to work...

Here is one of the finished products:

Today, when all the glue was finally dry, we made these little Pom-Pom birds to sit in the nests.

It may not be apparent at first glance that they are birds but, if you look closely, you can see that the blue one has two pink eyes and a purple beak.

 

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Mixing Colors with Eye Droppers

Our class has been working a lot on small muscle skills over the past two weeks. One of my favorite small muscle activities is using eye droppers. Last week we used them to mix different colored paints. I started by squeezing about a tablespoon of washable tempura paint into a bowl and then filling the bowl with water to make a very watery paint solution. I did this with four different colors.

Next, I gave each of the children an eye dropper and a clear cup filled with water (I used clear cups so that they could really see the colors mixing). At first the children didn't understand that they had to sqeeze and then let go before the eye droppers would pick up the paint. But after a little practice, they were able to get some paint into them and squeeze it into the water.

Once they got the hang of it, everyone really enjoyed seeing the different colors and shades they could make their water.

They liked it so much that they refilled their cups with clear water and mixed new colors for about an hour.

Besides helping children to develop the small muscles in their hands and fingers, this activity is a good science project because it allows them to experiment with mixing. I loved that some of the children would try to remember the colors they had mixed previously so that they could reproduce the results.

 

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