Planting Sunflowers

Every spring we plant sunflower seeds. Mammoth 12' tall sunflowers!

The children were amused that these could be the height of 2 Daddies.

Sometimes parents will e-mail pictures of their children standing next to their sunflower plants over the summer. I love seeing how well-loved they were!

Happy Earth Day!

Happy Earth Day!

This was so simple, yet so meaningful. We looked at our atlas and learned about land and water. We turned heavy paper plates upside down and painted them to look like the earth. It created some wonderful discussions on who has been in the ocean, who has flown over the ocean, and how it's different than land.

Interested in more Earth Day ideas?

Come on over!

Eggshell Art

One of our favorite spring art activities is using colored, crushed eggshells. Make sure to rinse them with bleach and then you can add food coloring.

We love using stencils. Apply glue to the entire piece of paper, add stencil, and then the eggshells.

Once the eggshells are on the glue (and on your fingers!), carefully peel the template from the paper.

Happy Easter!

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Easter Egg Hunt with the 2's

Okay, I admit it. I kept thinking we had one more week before Easter! So it was only this morning that it dawned on me (thanks to the teacher next door), that it was THIS Sunday. Panic started to set in. Thank goodness for all my co-teachers. They came over and helped get our Easter bags set up on the art table (because no, they hadn't been painted yet) collect eggs, and fill the eggs. We made it just in time before the children arrived. Deep breath. Phew! Okay, no one would even know. And I even had a new student! Stay calm, smile, stay calm. It will all be fine.

And it was fine. No, it was FUN!

First we stamped our bags. Thankfully the sun was shining so we set them outside for a quick dry since they were going to be used today.

We put handles on them, filled them with Easter grass, and each child got one plastic egg filled with 2 chocolate eggs and some stickers.

We then had an egg hunt in the gym. The fun for 2's is to find the eggs and put them in one big basket. Over and over again. One of our teachers would grab some more from the basket and hide them, several times, until the children seemed to lose interest.

We returned to class, read Happy Easter, Mouse and had our snack.

But the best part was showing our parents our Easter bags. The children were so excited!

Friday will be our 3's Easter hunt. But I will be more organized because it won't be a surprise. Next time I might want to pay more attention to the calendar! Or not schedule evaluations and conferences on the same week.

Our Color Wheel

This is one of my favorite activities about color: Making a color wheel. We sent a note home asking for the children to collect random objects from different colors of the rainbow. This gives such an assortment, plus it's more meaningful since the children brought them from home.

We then applied the paint to the paper. First the primary colors, then we mixed those to make the secondary colors.

Once the paint was dry, the children sorted their objects by color.

They then glued them to the matching color on the wheel.

I originally got this idea from reading Kristin's website. Look at her cool color wheel at Preschool Daze!

Moving Water

My very favorite thing is to observe a group of children engrossed in play.

It started with a sensory table filled with water. However, they wanted to move their boats more. So that meant adding a rain gutter. (See? I told you we get good use out of our gutters!)

Then, another tray was found to empty some water from the sensory table. By now, water was getting everywhere and the rain was subsiding outside, so we moved everything out there.

This was the same day we did our car painting, so we decided to have them wash the painted cars in the bins of water. 

I think they could have/would have done this for hours if we had more time. Water was moving all over, their clothes were getting wet (thankfully they all have an extra set of clothes at school), and they were happy!

My best kind of day!

Cars Down Ramps In Paint

Last week was our transportation unit. One of our favorite activities is running small cars through paint and rolling them down a rain gutter.

We put strips of paper on parts of the gutter to pick up the tracks.

Make sure to have a tray at the bottom to collect the wet cars!

This is fun for both 2 and 3 year olds.

I'm linking up with It's Playtime!