Fizzing Rainbows

I saw this great idea over at Fun-a-Day and felt that it would be a great
                      activity to do with our big buddies.
            
I spent part of an afternoon helping the grade 7s make the rainbow cubes.
          
The recipe calls for baking soda, jello powder and water.  We hid pony beads, matching the colour of the jello, in each cube.  Once all the trays were full they went in to the freezer.
 
Each buddy group had a tray, a baggie of the rainbow cubes, a bottle of vinegar, eye droppers and pipe cleaners.
 
They took turns squirting the vinegar onto the cubes and watching the reaction.
               
                The jello powder provides the rainbow bright colours. 
When we were making the cubes we could really smell the fragrances of the jello. 
            But once we used the vinegar that was all we could smell.

We caught a few buddy partners listening to the fizzing sound of the cubes.
                     
  As the cubes started to dissolve the children started to see the beads.
 
They carefully picked them out and set them aside till they had two of each
                                                   colour.
 
         They then took their beads and threaded them on to the pipe cleaners
                 
                           making bracelets, one for each buddy.
   
                  From fizzing rainbows to beaded buddy bracelets!

A Math Song

            
                      One Leprechaun went out to play
                   Over the rainbow on St. Patrick’s Day
                    Golden coins fell, clink, clink, clink
                     How many coins fell, do you think?
        
This is a number guessing game.  We took turns dropping the coins and guessing how many fell.  The lower number groups were easier to guess but as the amount of coins grew the children still guessed either small numbers or really big numbers.

Here’s a video after we did the song a few times.

 Sometimes I feel like I'm alone with the children at circle time.  I have a few parents that will always sing and I thank them for being wonderful role models for their children.  This video shows one example of how I encouraged the grown ups to take part.

Rolling Oats

Colleen, another facilitator in our district, told me about a set of food kits at our Learning Resource Centre.  In the past I’ve borrowed the ice cream maker kit when we made fresh ice cream.  I also borrowed the pasta maker but was a bit intimidated to try it.
             
                              This time I got the Grains kit. 
It has two grinders; one for seeds, like poppy or flax and the other is for rolling oats.
 
                   This is the oats roller.  It clips on to the table. 
            It has two steel wheels that the whole oats slip through.
              
                     Here are the oats before and after rolling them.

                 We rolled enough oats to make apple oatmeal. 
                     
It was rewarding to learn how oats are rolled and be able to use them to cook a delicious snack.

Colleen has offered to give me a lesson on making pasta sometime.  I’m looking forward to that.

Experimenting with Colours

     A week ago I shared a post about painting daffodils at a table with
                       small easels made from pizza boxes.
              
    Last Friday was the beginning of changing the daffodils to carnations.  
          We started by doing the carnation colour changing experiment.

   The children added colour dye to bottles of water, sometimes having to
                                mix two colours to make a new one.
             
         
        They each added a flower to their bottle and we talked about our
                            predictions of what might happen.

           
Monday morning the families arrived to see our daffodils and tulips moved off our painting table and in their place were the carnations.  We noticed, right away, how the white carnations now had colour around the edges of the petals.
 
This week most of the children understood that the flowers in the middle of
                           the table were there as a subject to paint.
 
I also changed the paints to watercolours.  I noticed that the children enjoyed using the small paint palette to mix the colours.  Some learned that the more water they used, on the paint, the darker the colour would be on the paper.
                      
   Some came to the table with a different subject in mind and with focus
                        was able to paint it on the paper.

Golden Rocks

After St. Patrick’s Day I brought the pot that we found in a tree back to school.  I wanted the children to make a connection with what we did outside to the school.  I also had left over gold rocks so I made an ABC matching game.
            
       I covered a low table with white paper and traced around the 26 rocks. 
                     On each rock I wrote a letter of the alphabet.
                   
           The pot sat in the middle of the table holding all the rocks.
                     
The children picked a rock and tried to find it’s match.  It was difficult at first since there were 26 choices but as they matched more and more rocks it became easier and their confidence grew.
               
Another difficulty was that I didn’t print the letters all in the same direction, so they had to either move around the table or turn the rock in their hand to make them look the same. 
                  
This was difficult for the younger children who do not yet recognize the letters. 
             
If two people did this at the same time it was an opportunity to reinforce turn taking, waiting for your turn and encouraging each other.

A couple of families did recognize the pot from our Outdoor Adventure the other day and they recalled where we found it and what we did with it.

Over in the Meadow–StoryWalk®

Yesterday, part of our morning at the park was spent doing a StoryWalk®. 
               
A StoryWalk® provides an opportunity for the families to enjoy a book as they walk around outdoors.  It promotes literacy, physical activity and builds a love for reading between adult and child.
                             
I chose to offer this book since we were going to be walking around a meadow.
                
I bought two copies at a thrift store and took them apart.  I mounted each page on construction paper and laminated.  After attaching them to a paint stir stick, with tape, I stuck them in the ground.
  
              
We followed a path around the meadow and at each page we stopped and sang together.  Then we would count to figure out what number to expect next.
                
I really like this version of this old song.  The illustrations were produced with common items found around the home. 
                  
For example they use boot laces for a bird’s nest or a garden glove for a turtle’s body.  This provided us another opportunity to build language and talk about creativity.
                         
               After about the third page the children really got into it. 
                   
Once we finished singing and talking about the pictures they would run off to the next one and wait for us to catch up.
               
Another reason I liked this book is because of the action words they used to describe each animal, such as ‘gnaw, jump, quack, bask (a new word).  As we sang we would act like each animal.
                    
I’m not sure if they were getting tired or really curious about the pictures but they started sitting by each picture and getting an up-close look.  I do know that they are understanding that the marks on the page tell us the story.

On another note:  as we were setting up this activity in the park other people were out for their morning walk.  Several stopped and asked what we were doing, others found us and said how delighted they were with this surprise this morning.  Two older ladies told us how much they loved this song when they were younger. 

The StoryWalk® Project was created by Anne Ferguson of Montpelier, VT and developed in collaboration with the Vermont Bicycle & Pedestrian Coalition and the Kellogg Hubbard Library.