What a lovely day. :-) My boys went back to school and my preschool students came back with smiles and excitement. Just a reminder to our preschool families (and school-age children), please ensure that your child gets proper rest so that they can learn and develop to their greatest potential!
I'm not even going to try to share EVERYTHING we do in a day. Just not possible. So I'll try to share a couple activities each day. Today I'd like to share our art and math activity.
Bubble Art
I colored our bubbles with liquid watercolor and chose to pour just a little into bowls so that we didn't have a bubble bottle incident. They tend to be easily knocked over! Also, the watercolors I used were not really all that washable so I didn't want them to stick their fingers into the bottle each time they dropped the wand inside. We started with our paper on the sliding glass door and ended up placing our paper down on the floor. We found that the bubbles would just 'float off' when we tried to blow them at the paper. :-) However, the children had more success at blowing bubbles downward toward the paper. The interest point was popping the bubbles. If you are able to get a bubble to land on the paper and stay for a few seconds it made a circle. I found that they were more excited about it when they worked with someone else so I suggest that this be a group activity or if you are homeschooling your little one then ask if they'd like to work with you or vice versa. This can be done outside for less mess worries (though it really wasn't much of a mess this morning) as well on smaller or larger sheets of paper. Consider having your child cut out a circle first and bubble paint onto a circle to reinforce scissor practice and the shape circle.
In the Montessori circles you'll hear about "crumbing a table". I used that idea as a jumping board to our math activity we did today. The children love to help but it isn't always a "help" so why not really teach them the right way to do it so they can be a true help...and in the process, reinforce shapes, number recognition and counting with meaning.
As you can see, the tray allows for the material to be contained. I created a square with masking tape in the center of the tray. This is where they swept the foam shapes too. The goal of that is to encourage them to create a pile and sweep it into the dustpan in one or two sweeps. I created cards that had the numeral, numeral word and a corresponding number of shapes. The children flipped a card over, told me what the number and shape was, if they could. If they didn't recognize the number we counted the shapes together. Then they put that many foam shapes onto their tray, swept them into the square and then together into the dust pan and dumped it in the "trash". FYI: I made sure there was enough of the shapes for each child to do it without sorting through the "trash". Eventually I'll move the square onto the table cloth with we do projects like sand pouring or have a lot of snips from cutting. Then we'll move the masking tape square to the floor and practice with the broom.
Hope your "week" started with a smile!
Fun activities!
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