Mice and color mixing

Mice and a color mixing lesson!!!

We began our lesson by reading the story, Mouse Paint by Ellen Walsh. It is such a cute story about 3 white mice who have some fun mixing different color paints together.

Our morning message for the day posed three questions. What colors could we make by mixing two primary colors together? (The colors I chose were the same ones from the story). I put two small pieces of  playdoh into the three bags. I then chose 3 different children during circle time to mix the playdoh in the bag to see what color it would become. The other children watched and cheered on their friends. We then completed our chart and filled in the blanks as a class. Afterwards, the other children were able to mix their playdoh and each child was able to bring a small piece in either orange, green or purple home to show their families the results from our color experiment.
 

 After our morning meeting, we decided to make some tracks of our own just like the mice. The children were invited to dip their feet in the paint and walk across the paper! It was very slippery so I made sure to give them my hand so that they wouldn't fall.

They were encouraged to step onto the colors and see what would happen! Such a fun sensory experience that opened up some great descriptive vocabulary.

The children then explored and experimented with the primary colors on their own. We used cotton balls to paint with and pretended they were the mice still having fun with the paints.

 

Through the children's explorations they discovered that primary colors can be mixed together to create secondary colors. 

Hermit Crabs

Hermit Crabs!!!

Our classroom pet this year is a hermit crab by the name of, Mr. Appleton! 

We read the story, A House for Hermit Crab by Eric Carle. The hermit crab in this story has just moved into a new shell and he is not satisfied by how it looks so he ends up decorating it with sea creatures and making many new friends in the process. By the end of the story, he ends up having to once again move to a bigger shell. A smaller hermit crab then comes along and ends up taking over use of his old shell. The older hermit crab makes the younger one promise to take good care of his friends and he sets off on another adventure to enhance his shell.



After reading the story we made some hermit crab inspired artwork and we learned some interesting facts about hermit crabs! 

 

Hermit Crab Facts!

 

*Hermit crabs moult as they grow, which means that they shed their exoskeleton and grow a new one.

 

*Hermit crabs drink by dipping their claws in water and depositing the water into their gills and mouth.

 

*There are over 600 species of hermit crabs in the world today.

 

*Hermit crabs are not fussy eaters and will eat such things as fresh fruit and vegetables as well as small amounts of meat and fish.

 

*Hermit crabs are nocturnal.

 

*Hermit crabs have been heard making croaking sounds. It is still being studied to try to find out if this is a means of communication or what the croaking might mean.

 

 

 



Dogs!

Dogs!

Lots of dog lovers in our classroom! : )

We measured with dog bones! 

I first taped the bones to the ruler to measure the children's heights, then I encouraged the children to use the bones to measure items all around the classroom.

                   We painted with dog bones!

We played the game doggy, doggy where's your bone? 

To play one child is chosen to be the "doggy" and has to close their eyes while one of the other children is given the bone to hold onto. The children then all hide their hands while we sing the chant, "doggy, doggy where's your bone? Somebody stole it from your home. Wake up doggy. Woof! Woof!" The child playing the dog then turns around and guesses who actually has the bone. The children really love this game and the repetition in the rhyme can really help children to hear the phonemes (the individual units of sound) in the words which will aid them with pre reading and decoding skills.

Click here for some of my other Pet theme ideas.

P is for Pets!

P is for Pets!!!

We used pet stamps to decorate our letter of the week and we discussed what we know about pets.

We set up a pet shop / veterinarians office in our dramatic play area!

The children had so much fun caring for the animals, taking the pets for walks and interacting with one another while using new vocabularly. 

We patterned pets with sponge paints.

 

We each picked a mystery number out of a cup to write and used stamps to represent the number.

We used clothespins to count the pets, great for math skills and fine motor skills. 

Since our theme of the week was pets, we thought it only natural to focus on the letter p.

We made capital and lower case p's out of play-doh. 

Thank you Bella for bringing in the pine cones! 

The children had so much fun sorting and exploring these perfect pine cones!  

I always like to bring in music whenever I can so we also talked about another p word, pianos!

We did not have access to a real piano so the children were able to play and have some fun with a keyboard that I picked up from a yard sale for $ 5.00!!!

For more of our pet theme ideas see what we worked on for each individual pet! : )