Shaving Cream Fun

 I am a big proponent of sensory activities for kids.  Kids learn so much through their senses and as kids get older I think many educators tend to only focus on visual and auditory learning.  While these lend themselves easily to teaching (as in I show you and I tell you), kids can learn an immense amount through touch, smell and taste as well.

Shaving cream provides a great medium for using touch and smell, and occasionally taste, although most who've done it say it's not pleasant.  This is an easy activity to do.  All that is required is a flat surface, a pile of shaving cream and a shirt or smock to protect clothes.  If you really want limit the mess, playing with shaving cream in the bathtub gives you a pretty contained area and then everything can just be washed down the drain. 

I use the cheapest shaving cream I can find.  I have a few cans that my husband didn't care for, so I rescued them from the trash.  Total cost of this activity... free!

Catching up!

With all the hullabaloo of the holidays, this blog took a back seat (in a bad way).  But good news!  I got an awesome camera for Christmas and I've been taking pictures like crazy, so over the next few days, I hope to feature all of the kids and what we've been doing lately.

Halloween

We had a big Halloween party on Monday, October 31st. The kids all dressed up and we played several games like "pin the mouth on the ," jack o' lantern bean bag toss and "hide the pumpkin" (a spin off of hide the thimble). The kids got special pumpkin cake pops made by a wonderful mama and then other kids brought in treat bags and candy to share with their friends.

Fall Fun

Part of the joy of the fall season is playing in the leaves.  This year I was lucky enough that my two older kids, along with a couple neighborhood kids found leaf raking enjoyable.  For several afternoons, they showed up in my backyard to rake up the leaves.  The daycare kids loved running down the hill and jumping into the leaf pile.  Here are a few pics that I snapped.

G Activities

As part of our letter G activities, we read a street safety book (the name of which escapes me now).  The book talked about stoplights and the meaning of the colors.  Since "green" and "go" both start with g, we HAD to make a stoplight.  This is the first project that the kids did entirely by themselves with very limited adult instruction (basically showed them a finished one and said, "go make one.").

I thought they turned out quite good and the kids were super excited that they could cut on their own.

In honor of the Halloween season we practiced writing the letter G on ghosts, which were then decorated.  The kids all think it's great fun that there are Halloween words that begin with the letter they are learning!



Festive Fish

We've been talking about fall now for quite some time, so I was looking for a different themed "f" activity.  I happened upon Fish is Fish by Leo Lionni and felt compelled to do a fish activity.  I discussed with the kids out Lionni used watercolors in his illustrations and it was only appropriate that we do the same.  I made some generic fish shapes and provided the kids with watercolors.  They did an awesome job with the paints, remembering to rinse out one color before adding it to another.

Egg-citing Egg Smashing

A few weeks back we worked on letter e.  The /e/ sound is a tough one to master so when I had a couple dozen eggshells staring me in the face, I came up with egg smashing.  Each child received a cake pan with cleaned eggshells in it.  Armed with a "Whack-a-Mole" hammer, they went crazy smashed the shells.  Each time they crunched the shells, the kids were instructed to make the /e/ sound.

The kids got the benefit of a little hand/eye coordination practice and the fun of smashing something.  Win-win!

The kids also worked on a letter E worksheet.  This was the first time that the directions were read aloud, but I gave no further instruction.  Many times we would discuss the worksheet during circle time and we would come up with the correct answers as a group, but this time, they were on their own.  I did still provide verbal instruction to the kids as they cut out their pictures.