Learning about the letter B

This week we focused on the letter Bb, and if you saw the last post, you'll know we started the week by baking bread together.  Here are some of our other activities:

Bike riding

 

 Blowing bubbles

Baking a birthday cake

Butterfly painting

Teddy bear's picnic

It was over 100* outside, so we moved it inside this year.  The children brought their bears, and we ate bread and bologna, broccoli, bananas, and berry smoothy.  Yummy!

Bass

We are so lucky, my son plays bass, and showed us a lot of cool things about it.  We learned about the parts of the bass, heard the different pitches of the strings, and best of all, took turns touching the bass as he played the deepest notes.  We could feel it vibrating under our hands!

Baskets of beans

We finished the week off with another scorcher, and an inside afternoon, so I pulled out the baskets and beans, added some recycled containers and cardboard tubes, and the kiddos were happy and busy for an hour.

Baking Bread - an activity for the letter Bb

What could be tastier than freshly baked, warm bread, with butter melting into it?  Yum!  Engaging all their senses really helps the kiddos make connections, so we bake, smell, and best of all taste bread for the letter Bb week. Everyone washed hands, and came to the kitchen counter to help.

 Here are our ingredients.  We also needed a recipe to tell us how much of each ingredient to put in.

 

First we poured in the water.

 Next we added 3 Tablespoons of honey - yum!

  

  

We needed some butter...

 

... and oats, because it was oatmeal bread...

 ...lots of flour!

...just a little dried milk powder.  The kiddos thought that was silly - the only milk they see is liquid.

 ...and a little touch of salt.

Ms. Paula added the most important ingredient of all - yeast.  Yeast is the ingredient that makes the little bubbles in bread.  We looked at a piece that was already cooked and could see all the little bubbles in it!

 We put the bread pan into the bread machine to cook our bread, and set up an experiment with yeast.  If yeast makes bubbles, we thought maybe we could catch some in a balloon.  Ms. Paula put honey, yeast and water in a bottle, and topped it off with a balloon.  The balloon was very empty, and floppy.  We wondered if it would stay that way, or get some air in it from the yeast.

After nap, when the bread was cooked, we looked at the balloon.  Here's what it looked like!

Even better, here's what the bread looked like:

 So, was it a good cooking day?  Well, there were only a few crusts left over!

Learning with apples

I like to focus on a letter each week with the preschool kiddos, so we started the year off with the letter Aa, and of course, apples.  I invited each family to send an apple to school.  The kiddos were very proud to bring in their apples, and to show which color their apple was on our graph.  As you can see, almost everyone brought in red-yellow apples, gala and fuji types. 

Early in the week we did a blind taste test of red, yellow and green apples.  First each child told me which kind they thought they liked the best, and I graphed it.  (I forgot to take photos!)   I had pieces of peeled apple ready on tooth picks for us to try, and we tasted all 3 kinds.  The kiddos had to decide which of the three they liked the best, without knowing which kind of apple it really was.  As usual, the results weren't what the kiddos expected.  Half of them actually preferred a different kind of apple than they thought!  Cool!

On Friday morning we made applesauce with all those apples.  I called 2 kiddos at a time to wash hands, and come to cook.  We looked at all the different sizes of apples we had, and they put 3 in order by size.

Next came the hard part: peeling!  I peeled a ring around the stem of each apple, then taught the kiddos how to hold the peeler.  They learned to put it on the edge of the peeled part, and to push the peeler away from themselves and into the apple skin.  They were so pleased when pieces of apple peel came away!  With a little help, every child managed to peel and entire apple!

 Once our apples were peeled, I cored, quartered and sliced the apples - we talked about why using the sharp knife was a grown-up job while I did.  Then I gave the children butter knives, and taught them how to cut the slices into pieces.  Many of them had never held a knife before, although one of them told me she had - last year, when we made applesauce!  :-)

 

We filled a large pot with our apple pieces, then, satisfied, the kiddos went outside to play while I cleaned up and started prepping our lunch while the apples cooked.

 As I prepped lunch, which included mashed potatoes, I realized that the cooking method was exactly the same: peel, cut, boil.  I had to take the potatoes outside to share my realization with the kiddos! 

 Once our apples were cooled, we had to turn cooked apples into applesauce.  We started with a potato masher, each child having a turn to press the apples.  It was hard work!  I suggested I could use the blender to finish it, and everyone agreed that was a good idea.

 The result?  Tasty applesauce!  Many kiddos had 3 servings of it, either plain or sprinkled with cinnamon sugar.  We still have just a little left... that will be for breakfast!  Yum!

Developing Mathematical Thinking

Most days, after lunch, I offer a variety of math manipulatives for the children to learn  play with.   They don't realize that they are sorting, patterning, organizing data, or learning, they are too busy enjoying the materials.  I change what's available each day, and make sure there are both open ended activities and more structured choices available.  The kiddos use what interests them, or join in with what their friends are doing.  I do a lot of watching and listening, and ask "what if..." and "could you..."  

On the table in the foreground you can see children using felt rectangles to define their space as they work with plastic beads shaped like vehicles, and a toy with foam shapes to sort.

 

 I have a dozen or so baggies with buttons in them for our Venn diagram sorting.  As you can see, this one has red/black/both, others have options like star/blue/both, or  yellow/flowers/both.  I started with my button box, and made sets with what I had on hand. 

 Look how this child is using the cuisenaire blocks to build a 3D structure.  I love how she is using a blue and an orange block in this picture, but in the following one she has changed to 2 blue ones (of equal length) to support a crosspiece.

 Here's a close up of the vehicle beads.  We've only had these a couple of weeks, and most of the children are still sorting by vehicle type.  One day last week I joined in the play and sorted by translucent/opaque and sub sorted by color.  A couple of kiddos joined in.  I'll watch and see if that idea reemerges.

 Here the kiddos are playing a game of Grab and Graph Pattern Blocks, a freebie I found via Pinterest, at http://petersons-pad.blogspot.jp/search/label/graphs.  They grabbed a handful of blocks, sorted, counted, then graphed.  Awesome activity!

 Here the children are using mini erasers to sort.  We're using the felt rectangles to define our work spaces.  You can see how this child started out by stacking the yellow and green rectangles, then carefully sorted triangles and butterflies, before running out of steam on the various other shapes and colors.  Look how proud she is of her work!  She'll keep choosing math games to play, because she's having fun while she learns.

 This fun game is called Mosaic Mysteries, and came from Discovery Toys many years ago.  It is made up of hundreds of variously colored trapezoids, and just fitting them into the hexagon board is a puzzle, as the children have to orient each trapezoid differently so they all fit together.  Here you can see this kiddo worked really hard to recreate a pattern with the blocks.

 Here are some more pattern blocks.  In this case, the boys have worked together to fill a space completely.  Several of the shapes fit together in a lot of ways, but the squares and narrow diamonds have different angles than the other shapes, and provide a real challenge.

 This is a money counting game I came up with.  We enjoy the Jack Hartman song "Show Me the Money" on youtube.com, so I took the words, added images of coins, and made a game board.  The children roll the dice and take that many pennies.  As they are able, they regroup the pennies into nickels, dimes and finally a quarter to end the game.  When I very first started teaching,  I used fake coins, but I quickly realized the value of using real money.  In 18 years of using real money, I've only ever had one child take any home with them!  In that same time, hundreds of children have seen and felt and handled real money, and know what it really looks like, and the weight of it in their hands.  It is shinier and much more interesting to the kiddos than the fake stuff, which they all know is just a toy.  I've saved money by not purchasing fake coins, and I can spend these if I ever need to.  Real is definitely better!

 Puzzles!  We do lots of jigsaw puzzles.  Again, I change out what is available all the time, and have puzzles out to meet the needs of all my learners.  Many of the kiddos start out with just fitting pegged puzzles together, simply matching the shape of the puzzles and holes.

 We work up to the 100 and 150 piece puzzles.  Almost done!

There are so many ways to incorporate mathematical learning into our every day activities!