Celebrating Earth Day with Natural Materials - part 2

I wrote last week about some ways to celebrate Earth Day with natural materials - and this week we implemented those ideas at our library story time.  Here are the results!

We (50 children and their caregivers!) took a walk around the library, collecting natural treasures as we went.  In our plants themed learning earlier this month we learned that plants breathe through their leaves, so we didn't want to pick any living leaves or flowers off our plants.  The children were incredibly respectful, choosing fallen leaves, petals, sticks, seed pods, bark and more, but leaving all the living and growing things outside where they belong.

 It was an absolutely beautiful day for a nature walk! 

Back inside, we provided blank pages for the children to arrange their treasures, but instead of giving them glue or another way to stick everything together permanently, we made our creations temporary works - and encouraged our families to teach their children how to use camera phones to capture their pictures!

There was a lot of counting and lining up of materials, as well as some beautiful arrangements!

Here a grandmother is teaching her little one how to use the camera phone, and to email it to mom and dad at work!  This is age appropriate use of technology, a way to use it to connect children and families.  I LOVE IT!

Our caterpillars arrived this week, and we'll be watching them grow and metamorphose - we had out caterpillar books and magnifying glasses today.

We also put out a lovely natural sensory bin for our little ones to explore.  I recently trimmed my rosemary bushes, and saved the fragrant leaves to use as a base for our bin.  We added pretty pebbles, pine cones and shells.  As the children searched through the bin, the rosemary leaves separated from their stems and released a beautiful scent.  This was a sensory bin in more ways than one!

Small children seem to love collecting tiny things, and this group was no exception.  They carefully collected every pebble, shell and pine cone from the rosemary, then sorted and explored them.  (The long conical shells at the top of this picture turn out to be "unicorn horn shells".  Who would have known?)

Seeing the kiddos sorting, we grabbed out some trays and had them work together to separate all the materials - wonderful for us, because we were planning to sort it all out to put it away when the children were done.

There was one more fantastic learning opportunity today, but I'm not a skilled enough photographer to capture it well: we introduced the children to maple seeds.  If there was a maple tree anywhere in your neighborhood as a child, you may remember them as "helicopter seeds" - when tossed in the air they spiral down like little helicopters.  I had collected hundreds of them while walking this last week, and the children were, of course, fascinated.  There were 8 - 10 children at a time on the carpet throwing seeds up in the air, and laughing and jumping as they watched them spiral down.

Natural materials like these are free, just laying around at our feet, waiting for us to remember the wonder of being a child scientist, to joyfully explore and discover.

May all our days be filled with helicopter seeds, unicorn horn shells, and the laughter of children!

Celebrating Earth Day With Natural Materials

Earth Day is just around the corner, April 22nd.  #Kinderfriends, a group of early childhood educators, decided to do a blog hop to showcase some of the fun ways we've found to celebrate Earth Day - thank you for stopping by!

I like to use natural materials with my kiddos whenever I can, so I thought I'd share some ways to use free, natural items from your environment to teach important concepts!  The only item you need to provide for this is a way for students to contain their collection - a lunch sack or reused grocery bag works really well.  Take a walk outside, and see what natural items your students can find!  Have them make a collection of treasures.

My collection includes a variety of leaves and fallen flowers, plus some seed pods - but your collection will vary, depending on where you live.  Your students might find rocks, sticks, pine cones, sea shells - what ever you have around your school or home will work!

Have students sort their collections into piles of similar things - they're working on sorting and classifying skills.  How many different ways can they sort them?

Natural materials make excellent counters too.  I found a lot of acorn caps in pairs - time to count by 2s.  How about making groups of 10s and 1s, then figuring out how many items you have?

Maybe your students would rather make a design, like this mandala - and practice symmetry while they are at it. 

For slightly older students, counting the individual items in a mandala will reveal multiples of the number of axis it has.  For example, this mandala has 6 leaves, but 12 pink seeds and 12 crepe myrtle seed pods - because everything is in multiples of 6.  Can they add items in another multiple of 6?

Designs don't have to be math inspired - check out these insects!  While they are all symmetrical, this is also a great way to show understanding of other concepts that you've covered - such as insects have 3 body parts, antennae, and 6 jointed legs.

There are so many ways to use natural materials in our teaching and learning, I'd love to hear how you and your students integrate them into your Earth Day celebrations!

For more Earth Day ideas, continue the blog hop and check out the free ideas from our clever #Kinderfriends!  Next stop: Class of Kinders

Learning about Plants

Spring time is in full swing, with flowers blooming, trees budding, and insects humming - so it's a great time to learn about plants!

Ms. Debbie found an activity online that looked very promising,so I tried it at home over the weekend, to see if it would work for our preschoolers.

The website suggested submerging leaves in water, then waiting to see the bubbles of oxygen that the leaves produce.  What a cool idea!  I tried it out with 7 different leaves that I had on hand in the garden, to see which one(s) would best demonstrate the phenomena.  

I found that the herb leaves were too small to show it well, but large flat leaves were great!  After one hour I could see some bubbles, and after 2 hours there were a lot.

Debbie and I decided to set the demonstration up early in the morning before story time, so that by the time we were ready for hands on activities, there would be something to see.

I carefully set everything up, in 3 separate bowls, so lots of kiddos could see at the same time.

Unfortunately, with our tables being jostled by 90+ people in the room, any bubbles that formed soon were knocked free.  This would make a great activity to do at home, or with a small group, but didn't go as planned for our kiddos.  If you work with children though, you know this isn't the end of the story.  I'll come back to it shortly!

At the other end of one of the table I set up another awesome plant experience for our children.  There were large bean seeds that had been soaking for 2 days (I recommend 3 or even 4 days if you can), plus pea pods, seed diagrams, and magnifying glasses.  

The children were encouraged to carefully open the pea pods, and to pull apart the beans and peas to discover their various parts.  The seed coats on the beans came off fairly easily, and splitting the seeds revealed the embryonic plants waiting inside.  They kiddos were fascinated!

So how did that interact with the oxygen experiment going on further down the table?  Soup, of course!  If you have peas and beans and leaves and rocks and water, of course the children are going to create "soup"!  I didn't witness the process, but was delighted to find the result - because it is so very typical of this age group, and a resourceful young child found a way to turn my "dud" of an experiment into a developmentally appropriate experience.  The children are always teaching me new things!

The library has some amazing resources - available for check out! - including kits full of thematic learning ideas.  We pulled out all kinds of science materials to explore, including natural items....

...jigsaw puzzles...

 ... plant parts cards and leaf and seed samples to match to them...

 ... and plant parts rubber stamps, so the children would think about the various parts of plants (which we talked about during story time) as they "built" their own.

The rubber stamps were a huge hit, and a lot of our friends went home with green thumbs... and green fingers too!

Finally, to take advantage of the lovely spring weather, we had some seriously hands on activities outside!  There were soil and tiny cups for the children to plant a real bean seed to take home and water, and there was dirt to PLAY in!  

Dirt, plastic pots, trowels and some trimmed pieces of plants made for a delightful pretend!  While our young gardeners will have to wait at least a week to see their bean seeds sprout, this sensory bin satisfied their need for instant gratification, with a generous side helping of sunshine and dirt.

Sunshine and dirt, books and families... the recipe for a perfect spring day!