Weather Unit ~ Day 1 and 2

All the kids went down for a nap at the same time today so I get to blog Monday and yesterday's  activities! We started doing our weather unit this week. Living in Maine this time of year is great for this unit since we get so many different weather patterns in a week! This week we have observed sun, wind, cloudy, and rainy weather. The only weather pattern we better not see is SNOW!



 

 

 We have worked on our fine motor skills by stacking cheerios on a piece of spaghetti. We found that the spaghetti kept breaking so we then switched it up and used toothpicks.

 

One of our experiments this week is watch how rain forms by doing weather in a bag. This is day one where we placed some water in a bag, sealed it and placed it taped to the window to observe the changes that happen daily in the bag.

 

 



Before we left for vacation we planted sunflower seeds that will eventually be planted on our play ground.

 

 On Monday only one seed was starting to sprout.

 On of our projects was to make paper windsocks to hang in the play room. We used play white paper, glue and colorful tissue paper to decorate the windsock!

 

 Our windsocks hanging downstairs. We even opened a window a little bit to watch the wind make them dance!

 

Day 2 of our weather bag...condensation is forming to make a cloud.

 Wednesday- it is hard to see but 5 of our seeds are sprouting!

Conclusion of our Earth Day unit and the New week after vacation!

Last week we were on vacation, cleaning up around the center and building  a new door as ordered by the fire marshal so I did not get to do any blogging. This is the last few days before vacation and our Earth Day Unit.

 

 We have been working on the letter L so we made lower case ladybug "L" We first read the Grouchy Ladybug by Eric Carle!

 

On Thursday, we made our Give a Hoot, Don't Pollute Owls which are great since the owl is our Mascot!

 

Throughout the week, we learned about composting and had started our own compost bin with the scraps from out meals and leaves on the yard. On Friday, we concluded our unit by listening to the Lorax being read by Dr. Seuss and then had a special treat of watching the movie!

 

During vacation, we bought a whole bunch of new dress up clothes for our imaginative play! The kids had so much fun dressing up!

 This was one of our vacation projects...just needs to be sanded and painted!

More Earth Day Activities....

We colored some books that talk to us about taking care of the Earth and why it is important to recycle and not waste water!



 

We made hand Print tree collages. We did it three different ways for the three different age groups. We traced all the kids hands and cut it out for all of them. For the babies under one, I glued the "trunk" and they painted their leaves. For the 1-2 group, I glued the trunk and the kids glued the "leaves" on their trees and the 2 and over group, the did all the gluing!

 We also made Earth collages with gluing tissue paper!

 My two older kids will be 3 in June so we have been working on our letters, and spelling our names. I made name puzzles for them to help practice with the spelling of their names.

 

We will have one more Earth Day blog post coming! Keep checking back... :)

Earth Day Activities Part 1-Picture Alert!

We started our Earth Day unit this week. This is such an important and exciting unit for us since we are an Eco-Healthy childcare center and it is important that we teach our children the importance of taking care of our Earth and to live a sustainable life! Our main focus this week has been about cleaning up our environment and recycling. We have read a couple of books about how recycling in fun and why we keep our parks clean!

We colored some recycling signs to hang in the classroom so we can work on learning what the symbol means and where we can find it. We also added another recycling bin in the daycare part so the children can recycle their papers when they are finished with it.

 We are also working on the letter "L" so we got leaves from outside before they get raked up to put in our compost bin and glued them on our letter Ls.

We also have made recycled bottle art! We used plastic bottles and put paint on the bottoms to stamp and make colorful masterpieces! The children loved it and the art came out so good!

 

More Earth Day Activities to come in the next couple of days!