Tuesday, April 12, 2016

Art Galore in Preschool

We had such a fun day in preschool today.  Just as a !!!!WARNING!!!! if you are a parent and are super fond of surprises you'll want to skip this post as it's a spoiler alert for art gifts that will be coming your way later in the year.  They just turned out so super cute that I had to share the pictures of our work today.

We had a full day of preschool today and the kids were SUPER excited about it.  After our unprecedented 6 missed days of school due to snow we scheduled a full day starting right after breakfast and running through our regular school time.  It was wonderful to have the extra time to play and create that usually makes us run out of time so quickly.  Plus the kids were really excited about having snack and lunch together. 
 After we did our reading lessons as usual in the school room we headed to the kitchen to get messy.  We did a handprint painting craft that will become our Mother's Day gift in May.  I love how the kids can really make it their own and be in charge of adding the extra details at this age.  In the past I've added the extra pieces for them after they've done their handprints or footprints.  Now they are big enough to make it entirely on their own and they show so much character.  They turned out so cute!  After doing our directed art activity they were given the opportunity to paint whatever they would like on a large piece of paper.  I believe that painting is an activity that should be done more often and find myself sad that we run out of time and don't get to paint as often as I'd like.
 After some wiggle time outside while I changed the scene at the table from one project to another we got started on our second art project of the day.  I was slightly nervous having never used water color crayons on canvas with preschoolers before and I wasn't sure how it would turn out.  Their art pieces turned out phenomenal!  They were given a canvas with a "Wild Thing" outline on it.  We worked together coloring in one section of the image at a time. These kids have grown so much from their toddler scribbles years ago to making designs on their Wild Things today. After coloring the whole image we pulled out the watercolor brushes and water.  Once again I directed each step of the way.  We talked about the importance of rinsing your brush, not using too much water but using enough to turn the crayons into paint.  It was a wonderful experience and the colors turned out so bright, they really came to life!  These projects will be part of our "Where the Wild Things Are" graduation celebration at the end of May.
 After lunch (super fun!) and some time to play outside again we headed downstairs for writing and math.  Kids were encouraged to write about their favorite part of the school day so far.  Many of them wrote about painting and many of them wrote about playing outside.
 The very basic addition within 5 lesson today was super crucial but we may have been rather brain dead by this point in the day, so I think I'll revisit it on Thursday.  We talked about how the little "t" (+) is called the "plus" or "addition" sign and that means that we are putting two groups together.  We also talked about how the equal sign means that the numbers or objects on one side have to be exactly the same as the numbers or objects on the other side.  We used blocks with our work pages to try and solidify the concepts of putting 1 block on a 2 block and it's the same size as a 3 block.  We'll keep working on this on Thursday :).

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