News, Views, and Stews: A Hop, Skip, and a HOLY MOLY! Where Has the Time Gone!

Monday, April 28, 2014

A Hop, Skip, and a HOLY MOLY! Where Has the Time Gone!

So I have had a bit of difficulty maintaining my weekly posting goal as of late. I am adjusting to a few changes around the house...AND we hit birthday season where all but 2 of our 6 family members celebrate withing a period of 5 weeks!! It's a bit nutty in and of itself, but let's go ahead and throw Easter on top of it and that's a whirlwind of activity that has led me to put my blogging to the side for a bit. I must admit, mama's T-I-R-E-D! But enough whining! On with the important stuff :)

We have been busy having fun in our little classroom preparing for Easter. We began by sequencing the story from Palm Sunday to Easter through pictures. (We are a Christian Preschool, so we are allowed to actually teach our kiddos about God!) I combined this sequencing activity with a review of our ordinal numbers and general number writing.

We also took some time to decorate our hallway making beautiful cross "stained glass" windows! The kiddos had a lot of fun doing this quick and easy activity. It turns out that tissue paper is a great exercise of those fine motor muscles!!

We die cut crosses into a folded 8.5X11 regular piece of construction paper. We folded it in half (like a hamburger).

Then we cut 2 rectangles of contact paper per student. This just has to be large enough to cover the cross cut out.

We pre cut squares of multi colored tissue paper so that they were ready to go for the kiddos!! We taped the contact paper down so that the sticky side was up and let the kids cover the sticky side with a beautiful layer of colored tissue paper! After the first piece of contact paper was covered (at least where the cross would show--a few spaces doesn't hurt anything!), we took the 2nd piece and sealed the tissue paper in. Then the kids glued their piece of "glass" on the inside of the folded cross die cut. They turned out beautiful! But, before we hung them up, I could not pass up the opportunity for a teachable science moment! We used a flash light to talk about solid vs. translucent materials. I of course had to relate it back to our previous discussion and exploration of shadows. We discussed how the black paper was a solid and the tissue paper would be transluscent--or allows the light to pass through. They had fun making their crosses glow :) We "discovered" how the glow changed depending on the light that we chose to shine behind it. We observed how the colors changed with the different lights as well. We LOVE science!!

Moving on, we did some more very "eggscellent" science! What better way to keep with the theme of Easter than to study the ever prominent symbol, the egg. We did some "eggsperiments" with our eggs and learned a lot.

We conducted this super simple "eggsperiment" over 2 days. You take a raw egg and place in vinegar. We used an air tight jar so that we did not have to smell our "eggsperiment". By the end of the 1st day the egg had already grown in size and begun to float. I have done this experiment for years and have always let it sit in the vinegar until the shell is completely gone! It's very cool to watch the vinegar eat away all the calcium carbonate out of the shell. However, this year, when brushing up on the science behind the coolness, I found that I could let the shell get soft for a day or two and then let the egg sit out and the shell would pull the calcium carbonate from the liquid in the egg to reform the shell! Well, I was super excited to try this...but we got a little rough when feeling the softened shell and had scrambled egg before I could get a chance to do this. Note to self: next year, 2 eggs in the vinegar!

Afterwards, we had a little more fun with our egg themed week. We did some creative writing. If you could have anything come out of your Easter egg, what would it be?