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We are just three days into our Experience Early Learning Weather and Seasons unit but we have already learned so much! This week our focus is Weather. We are learning about the different types of weather, what causes the weather, what we should wear during certain weather, and we have briefly talked about the four seasons and what the weather is like in each one. Like I said, we have already learned a lot! The children have participated in the Invitation to Create centers, math, literacy, and STEAM. Experience Early Learning offers hands-on, engaging materials that are perfect for your preschool classroom.
At this age it is all about the process of doing something, not the final product. Two of the Invitation to Create projects this week have offered a really fun creative process and the children spent a lot of time completing these. Our Wind Art this week was one of their favorite art projects we have done so far this year. But when an art project involves sequins, gems, grass, paint, markers, glue and a straw, how is it not fun? The children got to use the straw to blow the objects across their paper and we talked about what happened as they did that - did they move easily? During this creative process I observed the following: how they chose to create their art designs, if they ran into any problems during the creative process and if so, how they resolved those challenges (some items didn't blow across the paper as easily). The children chose to either draw or paint wind swirls (or both) on their paper then they squeezed glue all around. They worked on blowing the different materials into the glue. If one item didn't move as easily (like the gems) they picked them up and put them in the glue. They enjoyed making 'wind' through their straw and it was fun to see how each kiddo chose to complete this process.
We also spent a day learning about clouds. We looked at pictures of cumulus, cirrus, and stratus clouds and talked about how they looked different. For our STEAM lesson our question was How do clouds rain? Our lesson was centered around this question. We filled a glass full of water and topped it with shaving cream. We pretended that the shaving cream was a cloud and the children noticed it looked like a cumulus cloud. We all took turns dripping liquid watercolor on the shaving cream and watched it 'rain.' This was fun! We learned that when the water droplets get too heavy they fall to Earth as rain. We also talked about some big words like evaporation and condensation!
The children got the chance to make Cloudy Art in our Invitation to Create center. I sat out white paint, white paint watered down, an eyedropper and shaving cream mixed with glue. You want to make sure that you have equal parts white glue and equal parts shaving cream. While looking at our cloud pictures I asked them what cloud shape they wanted to create. We learned that clouds are made of water. They spent a lot of time with this creative process, using the eyedropper to create clouds. Afterwards we talked about what their clouds looked like.
We finished off our day with Counting Clouds. Experience Early Learning provides us with fun math lessons that are really engaging for your preschoolers. It is easy to adapt these lessons to meet the needs of your students. We took turns rolling our cube and counted out that many clouds and placed them on our sky scene. We are working on number recognition and one-to-one correspondence and games like this help reinforce our learning. To finish out this week we still get to learn about snow and rainbows!
