Fun with Elephant and Piggie!

We LOVE Elephant and Piggie!  And Pigeon! And Knuffle Bunny!  Pretty much all of Mo Willems' books!  Okay... I guess basically I just love books... but Elephant and Piggie are special!

This week we had an Elephant and Piggie story time.  :-)  Do you see who is trying to sneak in?

That silly Pigeon!  Don't worry Pigeon, you'll have your own special day in a few weeks.

Ms. Debbie and I acted out/read There Is A Bird On My Head.  I knew we were having fun with it, but it wasn't until I looked at the pictures one of our patrons took of us reading, that I saw how focused the children were on us.  I think the kiddos may have enjoyed it almost as much as we did!

Of course we sang and danced, and Ms. Debbie read another book about our cute friends - and then we got to play/learn.

I downloaded the Pigeon and Duckling finger puppets from PigeonPresents.com.  Mo Willems has all kinds of awesome resources for schools and libraries to use for his book celebrations, and there are also online games for children to play on his site.  You should definitely check it out!

The children made "nests" from paper bowls and brown paper.  I especially love the skinny pieces of cut brown paper sack, they made awesome "straw" for the nests.  Everyone colored birds and put them in their nests.  Now they can act out the story just like Ms. Debbie and I did!

Look at those fine motor skills - strengthening little fingers to prepare them for writing tasks as they prepare for school.

 

Our next station was making Piggie paper bag puppets.  I found the idea here.  There wasn't a pattern for them, and our paper sacks were very small, so I whipped up an outline and made copies on pink paper.  

The kiddos cut them out, and added eyes and nostrils to their piggy faces, and ta-da!  Piggie puppets!

Of course we also needed a third activity, a sensory bin.  One of the Elephant and Piggie books is Shall I Share My Ice Cream?, so Ms. Kathleen made us some ice cream dough.  She mixed a large box of baking soda with several packets of frosting mix in (just color and scent, sugar free powdered drink mix would work too), and made us pink and blue "ice cream" to play with.  We kept it in the refrigerator until it was time to play, so that it was cold too!

We pulled out ice cream scoops and some stale ice cream cones, and our friends had a great time!

I often mention that the children have different ideas for how to use things than what we envision, and this week was no exception.  One little girl played with her "ice cream" for so long that the cone began falling apart.  That was a new opportunity to explore, and she crumbled the cone and dough together for a very long time.  As I watched her, she told me she was making it into a "salad".  (I can see a lot of potential for an ice cream salad, she's brilliant!)

I turned poster board into the cover of an Elephant and Piggy book, I Am In A Book, and we took pictures of our friends in it.  When they were all done, Ms. Debbie and I had a turn too!

As the children left, we asked them to vote/graph about which character they preferred, Elephant or Piggie.

The graph is on the bottom left of our new graphing wall, and you can see for yourself which character had the most votes!  I created some posters to help parents see what we learn from this activity, and am happy to share them with you too.  They are free on my TeachersPayTeachers store, please click and download.

We'll keep building on this wall each week, always talking briefly about the results of the previous week's graph.  When we looked at our Chinese New Year graph, we noticed that there were 10 votes for dragon painting, and 10 votes for tangrams - they were equal!  We learned the sign language sign for equal, and added a great math word to our vocabularies.  I made sure that this week's graph is oriented vertically, because graphs are definitely not always horizontal.  We'll have to have some pictographs soon, and.... well, all that will have to wait.  Stay tuned, and come back next week to see what else we are getting up to at the library!

Need more Elephant and Piggie ideas?  Check out my post about Happy Pig Day  with lots more ideas about celebrating these favorite characters!

Celebrating Chinese New Year

Kung Hei Fat Choi  -  Wishing you all a prosperous new year!

We celebrated Chinese New Year at story time this week, and as usual, we had a blast!

I got to lead story time, which is sooooo much fun!  I love reading to the little ones, and singing and dancing, and did I mention all the fun things we get to do afterwards?  While I'm sure some people think I'm doing this as an act of volunteerism, I have to admit that getting to hang out and play with small people is an absolute treat for me.

I put together some props to use while retelling the story of the Great Race - the story of how the years of the Chinese Zodiac were named for 12 animals. 

We started with the animals lined up on one side of the felt board, and as I told the story I moved each animal across.  The children helped me figure out which number each animal was, and I put up the numbered cards across the top.  (This modeled the left to right progression of our writing, as well as numerical order - but all the children saw was a fun activity.)  Can you see the dragon puppets flying by the animals in the lower right hand corner?  One of our guests really loved the shiny dragons.

How about these for shiny dragons!?  One of our sensory bins had golden dragons, red tinsel, gold coins, red envelopes, and some other shiny shapes hidden in it. 

Here's our other sensory bin: pompons with jewels, tongs and clothes pins to work those fine motor skills.

Here it is in action:

Those little fingers are working hard, developing muscles that will later help these children to hold pencils as they learn to write.

Block play helps build hand muscles too, while also working on spacial skills, balancing, and learning about 3 dimensional shapes (with an occasional lesson in gravity thrown in for good measure!)

Painting our dragon scenes was very popular this week, as friends used sparkly paint to create a background, and added dragons on top. At least, that's what I thought was the plan, but as usual the children took the materials furthar and in different ways than we poor adults can hope to imagine: beautiful silhouettes!

I was surprised to see that the favorite center this week was actually the tangrams!  This set of 7 shapes can be formed into a square, or any number of other creations.  I read a wonderful book, The Tangram Magician by Lisa Campbell Ernst (no, I'm not affiliated with any book sellers, the link is just for your convenience).  In the story a magician transforms himself into different animals and objects, which are all represented with tangrams.  The kiddos LOVED it!  I put out tangram patterns of all 12 animals of the Zodiac that I made, plus enough paper tangrams for everyone to make their own creation - and they did!

Here's our graph that we made to show which activities each child liked best.  We looked at last week's graph, and introduced some great mathematical language: more, less, most, least.  Graphing their favorites is an easy way to introduce graphing, and all the math skills it entails - and it gives us great feedback that we can use as we plan future activities.

Each child went home with a red envelope with a nickel in it (red envelopes with money are a traditional New Year gift), and one of our families brought in delicious New Year cakes that she made for everyone.

 It looks like a very good new year indeed!

For more Chinese New Year activities, please see my Chinese New Year Pinterest board, and see this post from a previous celebration.

Hearts for Valentine's Day

 For our STEAM story time this week, we focused on Valentines day and hearts.  Yes, the cutesy pink and purple ones to glue on paper and to give to our beloved family members, but also the blood pumping, hard working muscular kind!

Ms. Debbie chose stories for both kinds of hearts, and we did some serious dancing and singing in between them to get our hearts beating hard.  It's so much easier to sit still for a story when you've had a chance to get your wiggles out!

The only difficulty we had with this theme, was limiting the number of activities we had to follow up!

One of our stories was My Heart Is Like a Zoo, by Michael Hall.   All the illustrations were of animals made exclusively with heart shapes - so we offered lots and lots of heart shapes, glue, paper and crayons for the children to create with.

Here are a couple of their creations:

There were also crowns, cards, and a few animals, as well as a whole lot of little fingers working hard at spreading glue and placing hearts - great fine motor skills for our preschool crowd to work on, and a lot of special 1-1 time with our caregivers.

I mentioned last week that a lot of our friends seem to crave sensory experiences, immersing themselves in whatever medium they can (quite literally) get their hands on!  This week we offered sensory slime to meet that need.  I added directions and links to the recipe so that parents and kiddos could easily recreate the experience at home.  Want to make slime?  I found the recipe here.

 I offered 3 different slimes to start with.  Two were made with Elmer's glue and liquid starch - one bright pink, the other white, and a third was made with clear glue and liquid starch, and included heart confetti pieces.  The texture of the one made with clear glue was much lumpier, and the children didn't use it nearly as much as the others.  As you can see, mixing colors with them was almost as much fun as feeling the cold, slimy mess running through our fingers.

 This was probably the most popular of our activities, with not only children playing with the slime, but more than one adult caregiver joining in on the fun.  (And why not?!  I am happy to admit that I work with little children because I get to cut and paste and play and learn along with them.)

We added a math element with this counting activity that I created.  The colorful pompons were a hit with the children, but as you can see below, one of our friends improvised with the marshmallows too! 

Here's what we thought the marshmallows were for:

 - a see-your-pulse activity from http://whattheteacherwants.blogspot.com/2011/02/science-experiments-for-elementary.html

- and a stethoscope experience with both homemade and real stethoscopes.  Unfortunately, with over 100 people enjoying our story time, we couldn't hear our hearts with the home made stethoscopes - but we did see children enjoying them and pretending to be doctors!

For an engineering element, we had recycled heart building blocks.  I found the idea here. This was a lot of fun, but more popular with the few older siblings than the preschoolers. 

To prepare this activity, I cut hearts from all kinds of food packaging that we had at home this week.  Into each heart I cut several small slits - the instructions suggested 1/4 - 1/2".  I double cut the slits, making them slightly wider, and added bright lights to the table so the children could check out the shadows their creations made.  (We didn't do a Groundhog Day activity as such, but Ms. Debbie mentioned the groundhog and shadows as we introduced this activity.)

I mentioned that we did a lot, and had trouble limiting the activities, right?  Yes, there were more!

This was my absolute favorite!  We turned the light table on it's side and put it up on another table, then taped on a set of animal x-rays.  On the table we put normal pictures of the animals, and the children came up and matched pictures and x-rays.  No, not hearts, but bones are pretty cool too!

Outside the door to our story time room we added a graphing activity, which I'm hoping to make a regular part of our routine.  It asked, "Which activity did you enjoy the most today?"  and gave 4 options.  I forgot all about the pompon counting and x-ray activities as I was preparing the day before, so those weren't on the graph this time.  Still, a lot of our families stopped on the way out and talked about which activities the children enjoyed most, and helped them contribute to the graph.  We'll look at it together next time, and talk about what has the most, least, fewest, more than, less than, etc.

Our STEAM program absolutely rocks!

Polar learning fun

This week at the library we read and learned about polar animals.  We talked about how some arctic animals change from brown fur to white fur in the winter - for camouflage.  We learned that polar bears have black skin and that the hairs in their fur are hollow to help keep them warm on land.  We learned that they have a layer of blubber to keep them warm in the water.  We even pretended to be daddy emperor penguins with eggs and then chicks on our feet! (Check out the cute chicks we all got to use - no, they're not penguin chicks for real, but we sure had fun pretending to waddle with one balanced on our feet.)

After all our singing and dancing and reading was done, we had some awesome follow up activities to learn from play with!

You may have seen the "blubber" glove experiment: the one where a child puts their hand inside a rubber glove that has been covered with a layer of lard to insulate it.  They put their gloved hand in ice water, and the blubber glove stops them from feeling the cold, much as many polar animals have a thick layer of fat to insulate them.  We have big groups come to story time, 45-50 children, so we needed a quick and easy (and not too messy) way to do this activity.  Here's the solution:

I put one zippered plastic baggy inside of another, then spooned in a thick layer of lard between the baggies.  I taped the bags together, so little hands wouldn't end up in the lard (ew!).  The result was a clean, dry plastic bag nested inside a bag of lard, and it worked beautifully!

The children were fascinated, many of them coming back to this experience over and again, amazed that they couldn't feel the ice water.  Of course, there were also friends who wanted to stick their hands in the ice water and just enjoy that sensation - and that's okay too.

Another fun activity we offered this week was ice painting.  Ms. Kathleen made frozen paintsicles (yes, I can too make up words) and the children ran them over their papers to create beautiful masterpieces.  I noticed that a lot of the children looked off into space as they rubbed the paintsicles around, apparently enjoying the movement and the smooth feeling of the frozen paint gliding over their papers.  This little guy painted two handed!

 

... and some of our friends painted their two hands!

Watching this, we know that it's important for us to continue to provide sensory play experiences!

We also had out some shallow trays of water, which were mostly frozen.  Some of the children enjoyed the sensory experience of the ice and ice water, while others used them as we had envisioned, by propping one end, and seeing which objects would slide down the ice.  The children are constantly showing us that there are indeed many "right" ways to do things in this world!

Snowy learning at the library

One of the highlights of my week is the time spent at my local library, helping out with story times.  The Thursday sessions are especially popular - not only do we sing and dance and read books, but there are also fun follow up activities.  This week our theme was snow.

I know there are a lot of people and places that have waaaaaay more snow than they want right now, but here in northern California there isn't any.  Not to worry!  Ms. Kathleen made us up a batch of instant snow.  (No, I'm not affiliated with or compensated for linking to fun things, and yes, you can find it other places too.  This is just to make it easier for you if you are interested.)
We put all the polar animals we could gather into the large sensory bins full of "snow".

 

Here are some little fingers at work, enjoying the sensory experience of the cool wet stuff!

We sang a snowman song as part of our story time, and the kiddos used this open ended art center to create snowmen of their own.  There's paint, paper, scissors, stickers of eye balls, and someone reminded us part way through to add some glue too.  (Oops!)

You can tell this was an open ended project by looking at the resulting creations.  Yes, there were some finger painted snowmen, and some made of paper circles.  There were also kiddos who were fascinated by the feeling of paint in their hands and simply rubbed it around, and others who created... um... creations!  Our focus was on the process rather than any particular product, and the children showed us many ways to work with these fun materials.

Our third activity was making snowflakes.  We had looked at lots of snow flake pictures, and had counted six arms on them, and most of the children made snowflakes that matched that pattern.   We provided lots of pipe cleaners, shallow trays of school glue, and shallow trays of plastic "snow" shreds.  This was a sticky activity!  After bending their pipe cleaners, the kiddos dipped them into the glue, and then into the sparkly plastic shreds.  They were so pleased with themselves!

Next time we're going to learn more about polar animals - I can hardly wait!

Kente Colors, art and math learning

Have you met the beautiful book, Kente Colors, by Debbi Chocolate?

 The illustrations by John Ward are a gorgeous accompaniment to the rhyming text about the meaning of different colors in the West African cloth.  There is even an author's note explaining a little bit of the history of Kente, which is just right for young listeners.

Years ago, when I taught first grade, I used this book as the starting point for a combined math and art lesson - which I thought I'd share with you today.

We started by reading the book and the author's note, and it is also very easy now to use YouTube.com to show students video of traditional Ghanian artists creating kente.  I like this link and this link.  We also reread the book, noticing the designs in the kente, which are inorganic, geometric shapes, in complex patterns.  Do you see the math lesson hidden in this gem?

Next the children chose paper in several colors, each of which has a special meaning.  I found a table showing the meaning of each color here.  I cut my paper into 4" wide strips - because traditional kente is woven in long strips 4 inches wide, then sewn together into pieces of cloth.  Making narrow strips also makes it easier for students to repeat the patterns, it seems to be a more manageable size.  You can see on the photo above that I've drawn a zigzag line on one of the strips, and have several colors that I'll cut all at once.  I also made 4 or 6 of each element, so I could create a repeating pattern on two strips of paper.

It can be difficult for young kiddos to make multiple pieces the same - so here's my trick.  I have the students fold the paper, and I staple the end together, as you can see above.  They can then draw one shape on the piece of paper, cut through all the layers without the papers slipping around, and end up with 4 copies of their shape.  If you need a little more detail, I wrote a blog post explaining this step by step.

Here I've cut out multiple pieces so I can layer them for my pattern.

Have your students lay the pieces out on their strips of background paper - they can move them around until they are happy with the design, and then glue them down.  (You might want to keep the glue back until students show you that they've created a repeating pattern, so they don't glue down something that isn't a pattern.)

If  you like, you can have students make another set of kente inspired pattern strips, and then alternate them with the first pattern - creating an even more complex pattern of patterns!

This artwork makes a fantastic display, and an excellent opportunity to discuss shapes and patterns, with an art history lesson too.  My students enjoyed this project - I hope yours do too!