Spring Is Finally Here!

Whew!  What a long and record breaking winter.  We are certainly thrilled to be outside again and seeing all of the wonderful new things that spring brings us.  The spring unit is filled with lots of observations and science activities.  We got to make Nature Prints that use the sun, learn about water and how it is absorbed by some things and is repelled by others.  We performed cloud experiments with shaving cream and colored water to learn how a cloud soaks up with water until it cannot hold anymore...then we get "rain".  Mrs. Hill brought in a forsythia branch we could explore and then watch root and blossom.  She also brought in a nest that looked very different from a regular bird's nest.  It was a round nest with a hole that she found in the ground once the snow melted.  The kids guessed it was probably a chipmunk or mouse nest.  We ate rain clouds (blue jello and whipped cream), made rainsticks, and looked for pictures made by clouds in the sky.  We each made a cloud page for our book, "It Looked Like Spilt Milk".  This book will be coming home soon for your family to share.  Unfortunately, it rained many days, so we will be exploring outdoors later on.

Shadows are so much fun to play with!  What makes a shadow?  Ask your preschooler!  We played with worms (Don't worry, they were rubber ones!) and flower pots.  We made the worms go in, out, around, above, below, over, under, and so forth using our flower pot.  We will do some plantings after vacation so we can watch them spout and grow (and so they can get watered and not die over vacation).  Mrs. Bailey played spring games with us during language group.  The activity shown below was a syllable game where the bee got to move as many flowers as the word had syllables (ie. wa-ter is 2 syllables so the bee moved 2 flower spaces).  They were thrilled that the bee got to the end and all the way back home again.

Egg following directions always causes some giggles.  Kids are learning how to add together two sets of items.  Below we did "egg math" where there are eggs in two small nests.  Then we move all the eggs into the big nest.  Now how many eggs do we have all together?  Yes, word problems begin in preschool!  We performed another experiment and sorted items into "blows and does not blow" categories.  We used Mrs. D's small fan to try out our hypotheses to see if we were correct.  Another sorting activity was things that grow in a garden and things that do not.  Our "Find the Raindrop" guessing game was a hit!  Mrs. D hid a raindrop under some colored paper umbrellas.  Kids had to guess where the raindrop was hiding by telling Mrs. D which umbrella to look under by using the umbrella's color, number or color and number (ie. blue number 4).

Bunnies, flowers, rainbows, kites, birds, and eggs made up our learning table games and activities.