Dry Erase Faces

I saw this idea on the Play At Home Mom blog. It looked like lots of fun, so I decided to try it out in our classroom. I searched through my many pictures and found nice face shots of all our students. I printed them out on regular paper and laminated them. I had lots of help with this because our class loves to use the laminator.

Then I cut out the pictures and got out the dry erase markers.

At first, the favorite thing to draw was glasses...

but soon we got creative.

Posted with Blogsy

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 :)

Posted with Blogsy

Monster Emotions

 One of my favorite children's books about emotions is Glad Monster, Sad Monster  which we read many times this week. The book came with monster emotion masks for the children to try on.

After reading the book, we decided to make our own monsters using an idea for blown paint monsters that I found on Pinterest. I gave each child a drinking straw and a glob of watered down paint. It took a little practice, but eventually the children were able to blow the paint around on the paper with their straws.

Once the pictures dried, we used googly eyes and markers to make faces on the monsters. Then I asked each child if their monster was glad or sad. 

 

Our glad and sad monsters made a very colorful classroom display.