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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Practicing Circles on the Map

This week my class has been very interested in sea animals, dolphins especially. One morning, one of the children noticed that there were pictures of dolphins on the world map that is hanging in the classroom.

I purchased this map last year and laminated it at my local Lakeshore Learning store (laminating is only 29 cents a foot there).

Since we have been working on our fine motor skills, I gave the children dry erase markers and asked them to circle all of the dolphins on the map. 

Everyone enjoyed this activity so much that we decided to also circle the whales, the sharks, and then all of the animals on the map!

When we were finished, our map looked like this. As you can see, there are lots of beautiful circles on it!

Emergent Curriculum in Progress: Building Rocket Ships

 Last week we had a great example of how emergent curriculum works. One morning, while I observed some of the children building in the block area, one of the boys said, "Miss Bridget, look. I made a rocket ship!"

 I asked him where his rocket ship was going and he told me it was going to space. As we talked about the rocket, I explained how there is a countdown before a rocket blasts off. We counted down from ten while several children, who had also built rockets, blasted their blocks into space. After a few minutes of this, I pulled out the iPad and found this video of a real rocket launch.  Of course all of the children gathered around as soon as they realized that the iPad was out. They loved the launch, so we watched it several times. 

Later, at circle time, I asked the children some questions about space ships and space travel in order to get an idea of what they already knew and what we could learn. I asked where the rocket went, who was in it, and what is in space.

The children answered that the rocket goes to space and has astronauts in it. They also knew that stars, planets, and the moon are in space. But when I asked what the astronauts would do in space, they were stumped. Several children suggested that the astronauts would visit relatives. One little boy said, "They will come here, to our school!" Of course everyone liked that idea until I pointed out that our school was not in space. I pulled up some pictures of astronauts on the moon and we talked a little bit about what they were doing up there. 

Now the whole class is very interested in anything having to do with space. I scratched the craft I had been planning to do that day and we made rockets out of paper towel rolls instead. For the rockets, I cut the paper towel rolls in half and gave one half to each child. Then I set out paint and brushes and let them paint their rockets however they liked. 

Once they were dry, I cut three triangles out of construction paper for each rocket. I cut a slit in each triangle...

and three slits around the bottom of each rocket.  

 Then I fitted the triangles into the slits on the rocket. 

The children stuffed red and yellow tissue paper "fire" into the bottoms of their rockets and they were ready for blast off!

 I am excited to see where this exploration of space and space travel will take us over the next couple of weeks. 

Windy Days

Last week, when we made our train conductor hats, some of the children wore them outside. The day was fairly windy and the hats quickly blew off of their little heads. Occasionally, when a child stooped to pick up a hat, it would blow away again before she could get her hands on it. Of course chasing hats across the playground is great fun so we started looking for other things that the wind would blow. We noticed that it was blowing the hair on our heads but everything else in the playground was too heavy for this wind. We decided to bring the scarves from the dress up area outside to see if they would blow, and they did!

At first we ran around the playground holding the scarves, but then we tried tying them to the fence. Every time a gust of wind blew the scarves into the air, the children screamed and cheered. 

We tried tying the scarves all the way at the top of the fence. When the wind blew, the scarves would blow up into the air and the children would jump and try to catch them. When there was no wind the scarves would lie flat and still and we wondered where the wind had gone. 

Because everyone was so interested in the wind, I brought a fan to school the next day and we made wind in the classroom. We experimented with different toys to see which ones the wind would blow. 

It did not blow the train or the play food. 

But it did blow streamers, blankets, mittens, and paper. 

Later we took the streamers outside. At first there was no wind. 

 But we waited and soon the streamers were blowing!

 This is a wonderful example of how emergent curriculum works. We had actually been planning to learn about cars this week, but when the children showed interest in the wind, we seized the moment and changed our plans.