Hi! I'm Ayn and I am a Ga. Pre-K teacher, serving 4 and 5 year olds in an inclusive setting. I share my classroom adventures on my blog, little illuminations.
Spring is finally here!!!! We have been celebrating the arrival of Spring in our Pre-K class for a little while now, but we have had several cold snaps, so it hasn't felt like Spring was official until the last couple of weeks. We have been learning about plants and flowers in our Pre-K class, so I thought I would share some of our fun with you here today.
We started by talking about the parts of a plant and how each part functions to help the plant grow. Later, we put together a little flower and the children helped me label each part (they named, we wrote). Originally, we didn't have pollen as part of this plant activity, but they insisted, so we cut up some yarn to make little pollen particles. (The children are very familiar with pollen, as in our area the pollen is so thick it coats the cars, streets and outside areas in a thick yellow-green dust. The kids actually collect bucketfuls on the playground and call it "broccoli" because it does look like little broccoli stalks when it falls from the trees, before being dispersed. )
We talked and read a lot about how water travels up the plant through the roots through little veins. This was a tough concept for the kids to really get without a visual, so we put some fresh cut celery stalks in colored water to we could observe the colored water as it traveled up the celery to the top. The children were so excited about this that they checked the celery every day!
We didn't want to waste the bottom we cut off, so we placed it in a bowl of water so we could observe it as it sprouted new growth.
We planted several kinds of seeds, and used some quick growing grass seed to make some "Hairy Harry"s. They drew a little face on the cups (unfortunately the faces don't show up very well in the pictures!) They loved watching the grass sprout and grow!
The children were very busy drawing flowers and plants. It seemed every day I got a new batch of flower drawings!
Right before St. Patrick's Day we used green peppers to make shamrock prints.
We had several field trips that week along with other activities and didn't get to use all the peppers we had, so we used some of the peppers to make flower prints with paint in art center. I love that they experimented by making leaves and stems, and some even twisted the pepper around on the paper to make original flower designs a little differently.
We've been so busy with field trips and "getting ready for kindergarten" activities that Mother's Day just crept up on us. We made these cute little flower jars for our Moms using fingerprints to make flowers and planted a little flower in each for them to take home to Mom for Mother's Day.
Happy Spring and Happy Mother's Day!
Stop by and visit me anytime at littleilluminations.blogspot.com or visit the little illuminations fanpage on facebook! And be sure to check out PreK+K Sharing EEE!
