Wow, it's already October! In my last post (over a month ago - sheesh!) I talked about being flexible. Well, my flexibility has definitely come in handy this school year. I'm the director of our two campus program (teach part-time/direct part-time) and as such, I end up being the person who fills in the holes, or goes to the place that makes the most sense with our enrollment and current staff. Well, with the new school year I had to make a switch to a different class on our smaller campus. Instead of a class of 15-20 kiddos I'm running a group of 5-10 (so different! - I can actually sit at a table with the students and do art with them instead of running 5 directions at once!). I'm really enjoying my new class and we've been having a great time together.
Here are some of the things we did this last month:
For our first week we take time to become familiar with school routines and for our curriculum we focus on colors. "Curious George's First day of School" was a great story to help introduce both the subject of school and color to the kids. In the story, George visits a classroom and discovers all the things the kids do at school. While visiting George also gets into the paints and creates all sorts of colors and, of course, a mess. We didn't do the mess part, but we did do lots of color activities including color mixing with paint and shaving cream, ice cubes, and eye droppers. (Sorry no pics - it was indeed the first week of school and my ducks were not in a row!)
The second week of school we focused on shapes. I LOVE the book "Mouse Shapes" and all of my students loved it too.
In this story the mice hide in shapes and entertain themselves with creating pictures out of the shapes.
For some hands on learning I gave each student a piece of black felt (8"x11") for a background and multicolored felt shapes. As I was reading the story the students were able to create their own pictures with the felt shapes. (This idea is not my own, but a combination from inspiration around the web.)
We left the book and the felt pieces out for further exploration at a center area.
Make a Square
For this quick activity I gave everyone 4 pipe cleaners. We lined them up to see if they were all the same length. Then, we discussed how all the sides of a square are the same length. Could we make a square out of our pipe cleaners? Yes, we could!
For more activities with colors and shapes see these posts: "Exploring Color" and "The shape of things".