Magic Milk Colors

 This was something I had heard about a long time ago but never tried. I don't know why I waited so long to try it, especially since it turned out to be so much fun. 

 We started by filling a shallow dish with milk. 

 Then we put a few drops of food coloring in the milk. 

 We used a tooth pick to put a bit of dish soap in the center of the food coloring. As soon as the soap touched the milk, the food coloring spread to the edges of the plate. 

 We repeated this experiment with different combinations of colors and they all turned out beautiful. 

In the end, the children just wanted to add colors and stir them around to make pretty patterns.  

 Since we couldn't save the milk, we took pictures of our colorful patterns to hang up around the classroom.

Feather Painting

 The ostrich feather is one of the children's favorite items in the classroom at the moment. They love feeling the very soft, small feathers around the bottom and then the stiffer, longer feathers above. 

 It's not a real ostrich feather of course. I found it at Michael's craft store last week. It looked like an ostrich feather to me so I brought it into the classroom as part of our African animals theme.  Since everyone was interested in the feathers, we decided to paint with feathers today. We used the small colored feathers from our art supplies. 

We squirted the paint right onto the paper and used the feathers to move it around and mix it up. 

 We added more paint and it turned into a color mixing project. 

 

 Using feathers to paint was a fun alternative to paint brushes. 

Monkey Play

Here is a fun monkey craft that we made with the two-year-olds today. It was a little difficult for them to do and I ended up having to help everyone quite a bit. It would probably be more appropriate for three- or four-year-olds but the children really wanted to make monkeys today and this was the only thing I could think of with the supplies we had on hand. They turned out very nice in the end and they are lots of fun to play with. 

 For each monkey, I cut out two large brown ovals, one small white oval, and a brown monkey head. I also gathered two pipe cleaners and two googly eyes for each monkey. 

 First, we put lots of glue on one of the brown ovals and laid the pipe cleaners across it. 

Next, we put the second brown oval on top of the first so that the pipe cleaners were between them.

Finally, we glued on the head, eyes, and belly.  We had made monkeys!  (Though some of the kids insisted they had made spiders.)

 When the glue was dry, we put the monkeys on the big tree branch in our classroom! 

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Fun with Foam Noodles

 At the end of the summer, I bought a couple of those foam noodles that kids play with in the pool. They were very cheap because it was the end of the season but once I bought them I didn't know what to do with them. Some time later, I read about this idea although I can't remember where. I cut the noodles into two- and three-inch pieces and set them out with a package of toothpicks. 

 At first the children experimented with pushing the toothpicks in and pulling them out, but soon they started to get creative. Here are some of the things they made:

 Buildings.

 Rockets. 

 

 Cakes and cupcakes. 

 Spaceships. 

This activity really allowed the children to use their imaginations. They had a blast with it and it only cost about five dollars! 

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Colored Pasta Bracelets

 This week we have been learning about the Maasai tribe of Africa. Two of our favorite books are Papa Do You Love Me? and We All Went on Safari. While reading these books and looking at pictures of members of the Maasai tribe, we noticed the colorful jewelry that the Maasai people wear. Today we made our own colorful bracelets out of pasta. 

 To color the pasta, I added about five drops of food coloring to 1/4 cup of water. 

 I poured the colored water over a bowl of uncooked rigatoni and stirred it until the pasta was coated. 

I spread it all out on a tray and left it to dry overnight. 

The next morning, I set out a bag of pipe cleaners and the tray of pasta for the children to use to make the bracelets.  

 After stringing the "beads" we twisted the ends of the pipe cleaners together to form bracelets. 

The children were so proud of themselves when they realized they could make these pretty pieces of jewelry all by themselves.  

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Sticky Board Fun

Recently I read about making sticky boards on several different websites and decided to try it out in our classroom. The results were wonderful! The children absolutely loved it and it was inexpensive and easy to make.

 To begin, I found a piece of stiff cardboard and covered it with white paper. 

 Next, I covered the white paper with clear contact paper, sticky side up. 

At first I taped it to the top of a table and we tried sticking all kinds of things on it - pom poms, ribbon, plastic letters, our hands, bubble wrap, and small toys. The pom poms and ribbon made the contact paper fuzzy and nothing else would stick to it after we took them off. 

 Then we taped the sticky board to the back of one of our shelves and made a second one so that more people could play at one time. 

I found some plastic hearts and X's and O's at Target that were perfect for sticking on the board.

 The children loved making patterns with them

or just sticking them on and taking them off again. 

We are planning to try sticking other objects to the boards in the future. 

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Crocodiles

 

This craft is a fun way for children to work on their fine motor skills. 

Before beginning the activity, I cut out a crocodile shape for each of the children. 

Then I folded them and drew guidelines for cutting. 

The children in our class love to cut with scissors so they were eager to begin. Cutting on the guidelines required a good amount of hand-eye coordination. 

Some of the children just wanted to cut and went a little overboard, which was fine. I had a few extra crocodiles on hand in case they wanted to try again. 

 We glued on the eyes...

and drew faces. 

I love that they were all different!

 

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