This afternoon when I took the class outside, there was water on the slides. This presented a great opportunity for the kids to throw every kind of greenery, mulch, dried leaves, and dirt onto the slide, and stir the entire concoction up with sticks. The dirt, by the way, was salt. When I asked them what they were making, they stated that it was “bug stew” because it was too nasty for us to eat, but the bugs would come and eat it up. When asked what kinds of bugs were going to eat it, they replied, “Bees and beetles!” So apparently the bees and beetles are going to be well fed tonight! I enjoyed watching the kids work together to make their concoction, though, and the thought process that went into deciding that only bugs would be crazy enough to eat the mess!
We did another color mixing activity, in which we mixed red, blue, and yellow playdough in different combinations to see what we would get. They had fun with that, even though I made the playdough a little too stiff for them to mix very well. After we mixed the basic combinations, I let them go to mix away in whatever combinations they wanted to. Of course, they loved that.
I did an art project this morning that I once again can’t give proper credit to for the idea. I thought I had saved the post in my reader this time. I feel like this is getting old and I need to apologize for it! But anyway…the project required coffee filters, water colors, and medicine droppers. We used water colors in red, green, silver, and gold so that the project would be somewhat Christmas-y. The kids basically just put drops of paint on the coffee filters, and the filters soak up the water (as long as the kids don’t use too much – if they do, it is a bit of a mess!). I found that trying to teach them how to control the flow of paint coming from the dropper was a bit of a challenge, but it gives us something to work on the next time we use the droppers. A few of the kids discovered how to control the flow of the paint, but not many.After the paint dried the colors on the filters were amazing, especially with the silver and gold paint mixed in.
Right before I started this project, the other three-year-old teacher set about working on a Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer project. You know the one: three popsicle sticks glued together in a triangle shape, a red pom-pom nose on the bottom of the triangle and two eyes at the top. She had started the project with both of our classes while I was out yesterday morning, so I couldn’t very well take my class and not let them finish. I pulled out my project to do at the same time because of the amazing amount of stuff I had planned for all of them to do in the afternoon. As soon as I got the materials together, the reindeer table cleared out and headed to the coffee filter table. In fact, the whole room was gathered around the coffee filter table. And I thought to myself, “Here is a prime example of why child-directed art is so much better than the typical cookie-cutter, ‘everything has to be the same and look like this’ type of art that is done in most centers – the kids actually enjoy it and flock to it!”
Uplifting Freedom 