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!

Easter Activities Part 2

 

 

We finished up our Easter Activities last week! We had a ball and played with homemade "orange like a carrot" play dough. We used Easter shaped cookie cutters to cut out different shapes! On Friday, we dyed Easter Eggs and made Sugar cookies that we practiced using a knife to spread special treats on our cookie! We worked on the letter S this week and painted with a string on our letter.

 

 

 

Easter Activities Part 2 -Lots of pictures!

We have been doing a lot of activities that are centered around Easter! The first set of picture is a game I made for the older kids. I cut out Easter Eggs out of different scrapbook paper and glued it on to cards and cut them in half to make a matching game. We started with the eggs face up and the kids flew through making matches so the next time I pulled 5 sets and put them face down. It gave them a little bit of a challenge but they did a great job working on their memory skills.

 

 

 

This is the egg game I made for the younger ones. It is nothing fancy but I took a couple of shoe boxes and cut holes out of the top. Then I put a bunch of plastic eggs in each of the boxes. I let the kids explore the toy and it was fun to watch the different ways the played/learned from the toy!

 

With it being so muddy out with the melting snow, we been coming up with some creative ways to get our gross motor inside. We made a "snake" out of pop beads and the kids took turns jumping over the snake. They loved it!

 

One of the art projects we have done, was finger painting shaving cream on paper to cut out Easter Eggs with. With the older kids, I mixed paint to give the eggs a swirl effect.

 

The last project we have done so far was gluing fun yarn on a egg. They came out great and was also a good tactile activity for the older kiddos!

 

In the next blog I will try to include pictures from our Jelly Bean Learning Series!

Easter Activities Part 1

With Easter only a week and a half away, we have started with our Easter themed activities! I have a lot of children under 1 1/2 years so on Monday, I took an old shoe box and cut holes in the top. I then put plastic Easter eggs in for the children to play with. They love to take the eggs out and put them back in! I haven't been able to take pictures of them playing with it yet but will hopefully get some soon!

For Evelyn yesterday, we started our jellybean manipulative series. I drew lines on a piece of paper and we measured the lines with the jellybeans to see how many jellybeans long the lines were. As we placed the jellybeans on, we counted. This activity worked on counting up to 25, one to one correspondence and measurement skills.

The last activity we did yesterday was use plastic eggs as our paint brushes. I put some paint on a paper and gave the kids an egg. They did an awesome job painting without an direction on how to do it!