Hay Bales in the Playground

We are always looking for new things to add to our playground. Early in October, Miss Marta had the idea to add bales of hay to switch it up for the fall. At first we piled the hay for climbing and gave the children the opportunity to explore it. 

 

The next week, I rearranged the hay to make little huts or crawl spaces. I added pumpkins, play dishes, and dolls. We decided to call it the pumpkin patch. 

The children immediately started using the covered spaces as houses.

 

 They took the dolls inside the "houses".

And relaxed on (comfy?) pumpkins.

They also spent time carrying and rolling the pumpkins. 

 This week, Miss Erin turned the area into a boat by rearranging the hay. She added a sail, fishing rods, and paper plate fish.

Fun Ways to Use Pool Noodles in the Playground

It has been so long since I last wrote a blog post! I recently attended the CAEYC annual conference in Pasadena. I'm inspired to start blogging again so that I can share some of the wonderful inspiration I received there. One of my favorite workshops was about promoting children's physical activity. The presenters gave us tons of good ideas to get kids moving in fun ways. They also pointed out that all of the materials they use are cheap and easy to find. Since this is my week to set up the playground at our school, I decided to try out two ideas right away.

1. Balloon Bashers

Materials needed:

- Queen size panty hose (thicker ones work best)

- Punch ball balloons

- Styrofoam pool noodles that have been cut in half

- Needle and thread

I found the noodles and balloons at the dollar store and the panty hose at Walmart.

Use the needle and thread to stitch the top opening of the panty hose closed. Leave an opening in the middle so that you can insert the balloon. Insert the deflated balloon, blow it up, and tie it closed. Turn the panty hose up side down and hang from the legs. I hung ours from a small tree in the playground but you could hang it from the ceiling inside, or from the roof of a deck. The nylon keeps the balloon from popping easily and if it does pop, the pieces are caught safely inside. 

Give the children the pool noodles and let them whack! 

2. Beach Balls 

This next one was so easy to put together and so fun to play with! I don't know why I never thought of it before. 

Materials:

- Beach balls

- Pool noodles that have been cut in half

All you have to do is blow up the beach balls, throw them into the yard, and hand the children the pool noodles. They probably won't need any instructions at all. Our children started by using the noodles like hockey sticks to hit the balls around the yard. Later they played baseball with one child throwing the ball for the other to hit. They also kicked and threw the balls.

We've had hours of fun being active and working up a sweat!

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Lots of Pumpkins!

Last week I went to Sprouts Farmers Market to get a couple of pumpkins for our classroom. They were so cheap I ended up getting about twenty pumpkins and gourds in all different sizes and colors. Since then, we have been using them in all areas of the classroom and even in the playground. Here are some of our favorite ways to use pumpkins at preschool.

1. Pumpkin Hammering

We hammered golf tees into one of the bigger pumpkins with the hammers from our work bench. Holding the tee still with one hand while hitting it with the hammer requires concentration and works fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination. 

2. Pumpkin Geo-Boards

This one was my co-teacher, Miss Erin's, idea. Once our pumpkin was full of nails, we stretched rubber bands around the nails to make shapes. 

3. Dry Erase Pumpkin Drawing

We drew faces that could wipe right off with our dry erase markers. 

4. Pumpkin Houses

We drew doors and windows on some of our pumpkins and added them, along with the little people, to the play-dough table.

5. Pumpkin Mummies

One of our class' favorite Halloween books is Skeleton Meets the Mommy. After reading it several times, we used gauze to make our pumpkins look like mummies.

6. Pumpkin Stew

 I saw this wonderful idea on the blog My Nearest and Dearest.

I simply set out the invitation to play and the children cooked up a delicious, pumpkin spice stew!

7. Pumpkin Painting

We dipped pumpkins and gourds in paint and rolled them across a big piece of paper. 

8.Pumpkins in the Playground

Sometimes it's best to just put out the materials and then let the children decide what to do with them. We took the pumpkins outside and added them to the other loose parts in the playground. Here are some of the wonderful and creative things we saw the children doing with them.

Some Plant Themed Ideas

Over the past couple of weeks we have been doing lots of plant-themed projects. Here are some of my favorites.

1. Silk Flowers in the Sensory Table

I filled our sensory table with potting soil, added some shovels and flowers pots, and let the children "plant" silk flowers.

2. Bottle Print Flowers

We used recycled plastic bottles to make flowers. Then we drew a little stem on each flower.

3. Sprouting Seeds

Each of the students put a seed in a ziplock bag with a damp paper towel. We hung the bags in the front window and watched them sprout!

 

4. Q-Tip Flowers

I had the children draw stems on a piece of construction paper. Then we used Q-tips to make tiny flowers at the top of each stem.

5. The Parts of a Plant

For this project, I cut out stems and leaves from green paper. I used pieces of brown pipe cleaner for the roots and real seeds for the seeds. I gave each child a set of plant parts and let them glue the parts onto a piece of paper. When they were finished, they drew a flower on their plant. As they worked, we talked about the names of all the different parts of the plant.

6. Gardening

You can always do some real gardening with children too. To read more about this, check out my post on gardening in preschool.

 

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Water Play Board

Recently I've been in playground improvement mode. After looking at hundreds of ideas on Pinterest, I came up with a list of things I wanted to try at our school. The project at the top of my list was a water play area where children could pour water into tubes and watch the water flow through and come out the other end. I'm not sure where I got this idea, but it was pretty clear in my mind what I wanted. All I had to do was find the right pieces to make it happen. Since we had a three-day weekend for MLK Day, I enlisted the help of my fiancé, Howard, and we made a trip to Lowes for supplies.

After about two hours at the hardware store, this is what we had.

Howard attached all the tubes to a 4-foot by 4-foot board.

This is what it looked like when it was finished. We hung it on the side of the deck so that some children could stand on the deck to pour the water into the tubes, and other children could stand on the other side to watch the water flow through.

At the top of each set of tubes, we installed a two-way "Y" hose shut-off connector, which the kids could use to open or close each valve. This way, we could have the water flow into both tubes or just one as we wished. Then we put funnels at the top to make pouring a little easier.

The children loved pouring water into the funnels...

And watching it come out!

I put a bucket at the end of each tube so that we could catch and reuse the water.

Playing in the water as it came out was also lots of fun!

At first I was calling this the water board, but Howard pointed out that it might not be a good idea to send the children home saying that they had been "water boarding" all morning :)

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