The kids came into the classroom Monday and began preparing for space travel. There were rockets, astronauts, stars, planets, buckets, scoops and aliens in the texture table.
In the tub, glow-in-the-dark stars floated beneath the black surface. There were basters, colanders, nets, pitchers and water wheels for some great water play!
There were space helmets and astronaut suits on the dress-up hooks. A new control panel in the loft helped ready the craft for a flawless launch.
The gravitron (a one-of-a-kind sit-and-spin toy) prepared would-be astronauts for the challenges of zero-gravity.
Pendulum-like asteroids at the building table took out tall buildings with a single strike.
There were space-themed puzzles, books, creation station supplies, and a space-themed flannel board.
Here are a few more photos of the things that were happening during our free play time:
Many of our parent-led activities were also space-themed (but not all of them). We played with light and shadow out in the hallway Monday, using old-school overhead projectors. Children placed templates on the projectors and then traced their shadows on white paper. When they were finished tracing, they took their work into the classroom to add watercolor paint. This took us two days to complete and these are on display out in the hallway.
On Tuesday we went outside to trace our own shadows with chalk. It was fun to see how they changed as the sun moved across the sky.
Wednesday we explored light and reflection with a collection of periscopes, kaleidoscopes, and prisms.
We also made “shadow art” using stencils of children in motion and crayons/colored pencils.
We brought our shadow play into the classroom with a shadow screen, one of the overhead projectors, some colored blocks, and a book about shadow puppets from one of our story times.
Our more “earth-centered” activities included playing an alphabet game with hungry mice and cheesy letters. Children used the mice’s tails to hook the swiss cheese letters they needed to spell short words.
We read a silly book last week about a man named Michael Finnegan. He grew whiskers on his chin-a-gen. He shaved them off but they grew in-a-gen. You know the rest! We made our own version of this book with Small Friends’ names and faces.
Thursday we added March items to our Memory Boxes – shamrocks and gold coins from our fun with leprechauns, and unicorns to remember our fairy tale theme.
At our group time we learned a silly song about bananas in the sky, danced to a song about rockets, read fiction and non-fiction books about space, celebrated a birthday, and heard about Panda’s adventures. On Thursday we were VERY excited when we got a surprise delivery of moon pies from the Man on the Moon himself!
A blog isn’t complete without some photos of our outside play time 🙂
We’ll do one more week of space activities when we come back from spring break, so please save those paper towel tubes for rocket-building!
Have a wonderful spring break, a Happy Easter, and we’ll see you in April!
Lisa & Jelena
Comments are closed