Caps for Sale

This week's animal of focus was the monkey and the book I chose was
"Caps for Sale"
by Esphyr Slobodkina.

I went to the Dollar store and bought about 16 baseball caps for $1 each.

After reading the book for a few days and having the felt board pieces available to play with, I told the story as if I was the peddler.

It was a lot of fun putting all the caps on my head and having the families keep count for me.

Once all the hats were stacked, I went in to selling mode.
"Caps, caps for sale! 50 cents a cap". Then the children became the monkeys and each had one of the peddler's hats.
We used the line "monkey see, monkey do" to encourage the children-as-monkeys to copy the peddlers actions.

This Little Light of Mine

Join the WeeHands Challenge on Tuesday, December 7th at 11am.

We will be singing and signing the song This Little Light of Mine.

For more information check out WeeHands

Sculpting

Today at the craft table there was plastercine available. It's a great tool for building those finger muscles of our pre-writers.












Great for rolling, squishing and poking.

All kinds of recognizable and let your imagination-go animals.

Goodnight Gorilla

Last week we had fun reading Goodnight, Gorilla by Peggy Rathmann. This week an area was set up so they could play with the story and retell it.

The cages are made from shoe boxes with construction paper fronts.
The keys are coloured to match the cages.

Owl Pellet Dissecting

Last week while we were studying owls I brought in a owl pellet.

We talked about different animals that owls may eat.
Then we pulled the pellet apart.

We tried to guess what the animal was. We did a survey and the majority thought it might be a mouse, although there were some feathers in the pellet.
It was a mole.

What if Zebra Lost his Stripes?

Today our animal of focus was the zebra.
I have a book called "What if Zebras Lost their Stripes?"
I drew an outline of a zebra but really it looked like a horse because there were no stripes.
There were two different art techniques to give them back their stripes.

The first was bleach painting. I know "bleach" yikes but using it in small amounts on paper has a magical result.
We used milk jug caps to hold a little bit of bleach and the brush was a qtip. It soaks up the bleach and doesn't splash or splatter.
The children made their marks on the black paper and watched as the colour disappeared.

The second technique was similar to tape painting that we have done before.
The children cut strips of tape and laid them across the zebra (horse shape) on the white paper. Then used black water colour paint to paint all over it. When the paint dried they pulled off the tape.
They enjoyed peeling off the tape. The parents enjoyed the effect it left behind.

Pendulum Painting

I saw this art idea on Teacher Tom's website last spring and have been so wanting to try it.

I found, at Dollarama, plastic soccer nets. I just used the pipes and left off the netting.
Hung a styrofoam cup from the top pipe, with one hole poked in the bottom of the cup. The tricky part was getting the right consistency for the paint.