In The Rainforest

We started learning in the rainforest last week! Our focus letter was Uu, and we used Jan Brett's The Umbrella to introduce some rainforest animal friends. Similar to her book The Mitten that we had so much fun with in January, this story has animals creep into an umbrella one by one, unseen by a boy that went in the rainforest just to find animals. After spending a couple of days with the book, we moved on to colorful rainforest frogs and the frog life cycle.

Here we are making our retelling story prop for The Umbrella. These came home last week with a story summary. As we read through the book, we found the corresponding animal card and slid it down our umbrella handle to join the others.

A big favorite this past week has been the rainforest animals story bucket. The children have been making their own stories and play scenes with small rainforest animals and trees. This was the assigned center originally only for one day, but has been requested every day since then as an extra choice!

The Frog Pond! The thick slimy water (Squishy Baff was added) hid a variety of colorful frogs, slippery water bead frog eggs, tadpoles and lily pads.

learning about life cycles

We've also been practicing our reading, sight words, and color words. We painted some frog cutouts, then wrote sentences using sight and color words. Some more color word practice happened by using clothes pins with letters on them to spell. At circle time, we built sight word sentences.

 

What's Inside That Egg?

We've been wondering what might be inside eggs lately! We've read several books about the huge variety of creatures that start life in an egg. Using paint, some paper macho egg shapes and paper bags, we created nests for our own colorful eggs. Imagining what might be growing inside our eggs, we drew a picture and completed a sentence about what might hatch:

a t-rex!

an apatasaurus!

Ariel the Mermaid!

an ostrich!

a crocodile!

a birdy!

3 Komodo dragons!

Teito!

a baby octopus!

We also imagined what it might be like to hatch out of eggs ourselves in the springtime!

Spring Color

We've been enjoying the amazing spring colors at school the past couple of weeks! There are so many beautiful flowering bushes and trees to see. We looked at some of these in class, and used paint, brushes, fingerprints and bottle bottoms to create some of our own flowering branches.

We also spent some time last week blending colors on our own. Everyone started with the primary colors of red, yellow and blue fingerprint, and a big paper divided into sections. Remembering to wipe off our fingers (or brush) often, we experimented with different combinations of color to make new colors. This was an open ended activity, with the kids choosing their own combinations. It was wonderful to hear them wonder aloud about what would happen with different choices, then experiment and refine the process themselves. We've got a good group of thinkers!

This week, we got our 3 primary colors back out again, only this time we had colored baking soda paste and colored vinegar. First we painted the baking soda paste on hardboiled eggs, then used droppers to drip the colored vinegar on top. What we got was wild fizzing color bubbles all over our eggs. We added LOTS of color, just to hear the fizzing and see the volcanic bubbling up. When we finally finished trying out lots of color combinations, we had beautiful Easter eggs!