Elephant Toothpaste

 Our school had the opportunity to invite some special visitors in to do an experiment. They are recent graduates from The Ohio State University and they are sisters. One is an engineer. They showed us how to make elephant toothpaste using dry yeast, hydrogen peroxide, water, dish soap and food coloring. The kids had a blast and wanted to see them do it over and over again. The "scientists" let the children pick out the colors for the toothpaste. I think it will be one they will remember for a while!

Playing with Light and Color Patterns

Snugglepuppy and I have been playing with different apps that allow you to create with light. I will list the ones we have found that we like that are free.

Android:

1. KidsDoodle

This app is lots of fun. You can draw or write with many different brushes including the ones shown in the pic above. You can change the background color, undo and redo brush strokes and the really fun part is you can watch a video of how you made your creation!

2. RotoDoodle

This app is a digital version of a spirograph. It is fun to play with. You can choose the size, color, and pattern. We decided to look for an app like this after buying a spirograph from the dollar store for Snuggle Puppy's prize box and then realizing that it requires a lot of hand strength and hand eye coordination. He's not quite ready for it yet, but this one is much easier to work with.

3.Magic Brush Box (Kaleidoo)

This one is similar to the last spirograph type app. The difference is you can control more of the factors on this one. You can change the type of brush you use and you can draw your own pattern instead of choosing a pattern that will just keep repeating. This app is by the same people as KidsDoodle and you can do the video of how your created your drawing on this one as well.

4. Glow Spin Art

This app is so fun to play with. It spins and you put your finger or stylus on the screen to make spirals out from the center. You can change the speed at which it spins, the size, color, and shape. You can also stop the spinning to take a closer look at it.

Ipad or Iphone

1. Art of Glow

This app is kinda like fireworks. Wherever you touch the screen, shapes explode out everywhere. You can control the shape, color, amount of shapes, size, length of time they last, speed, blink speed, and whether they will renew or burn out. Kids love this one. You can stare at it for hours!

2. Forge of Neon

This is by far my favorite one. You can make patterns in symmetry of 2,4,8,16, or 32. The picture shown above is with 16. Then you can also choose your shape and color. The best part about it, is your pattern is 3-dimensional. You can pinch and zoom, use 2 fingers to move the image on the screen, or use 3 fingers to rotate the image around. It is very interesting to play with.

Hope you found some apps you will try that can be great for teaching math concepts to your kids!

Creepy Crawly Critter Creations

We did an insect study this week. We talked about parts of an insect and then the students used popsicle sticks and other art materials to create their own insect/critter. Here is how they turned out.

Springtime in Preschool

We are studying Spring in our class this month. Here are some photos of how we arranged the dramatic play area into a Spring area.

Frogs on lily pads with cattails.

Logs made from rolled up brown construction paper and little plastic butterflies, lily pads and frogs.

Light table against the wall with bean bags around it to sit on.

This interactive wall has foam cutouts of fish, ducks, and frogs that are stuck on with velcro so kids can take them down and put them up how they want. There are also words stuck on with velcro to match with the animals. Our table is decorated with flowers and a watering can and there are dishes and food available for kids to have a picnic if they want.

We also planted flowers in cutoff water bottles. Here are a couple of pictures.

Happy Spring and hope you enjoy some fun activities with your kiddos!

I'm linking up at:

Nutrition Ideas

I'm not dead! Just thought I should start with that since I've been MIA for so long. Here are a few things we've been doing in our class focusing on our topic Food and Nutrition.

Found these pizza slice boxes in the back of a cabinet and decided to use them to make pizza. We added a little red paint to some glue to make the sauce, sprinkled on the cheese (shredded paper) and glued on pepperoni. Easy and fun!

Here is a great chart that my center purchased. It came with all the food cards sort. We put up pictures of the ones we ate for breakfast and lunch in this photo.

2 different graphs we made this week- favorite fruit and favorite vegetable. I liked doing the horizontal and vertical graph so that the children can see just a couple types of the many graphs there are. They get the opportunity to count, compare, and talk about more than and less than. Plus it is about them, so they had a good time. They were really anxious to see which fruit/veggie "won."

Thinky Linky Thursday

Featured from last week with the most clicks:

Liquid Layers from Life with Moore Babies

Congrats, get your button on my right sidebar. Thanks to everyone for linking up and don't forget to click on some links to vote for them!

Wildflower Hunt

We went to the Metro Gardens a few weeks ago and walked along the boardwalk trail. We happened to pick up this brochure that shows different types of wildflowers and where you can find each of them along the trail between the numbered markers.

While I was not able to take any photos of wildflowers on the trail while pushing a stroller, I do have some from around the neighborhood (Thanks to hubby).

I also found a website where you can put in all the information about wildflowers and it will identify the flower. There is an app that you can download for your phone as well.

Thinky Linky Thursday

The most clicked on link from last week was:

Yay! I finally got all my buttons (with HTML) put up on the right sidebar, so if you were featured, you can grab it from there. Thanks for linking up!

Tutorial Tuesday: Learning Air Pollution in Preschool

Today's guest post is from Brenna from Brenna Phillips: Children's Ministry, Education and Life. Please take a moment to visit her blog and make a comment!

Learning Air Pollution in Preschool 

During Recycling week and studies on Earth Day, the preschool students learned about the importance of keeping the air clean.

They drew pictures on black bulletin board paper. There were pictures of flowers, the sun, and even some letters of the alphabet. Then we took the black paper outside and sprinkled baby powder on it. Yuck. It made a mess out of the students’ nice pictures.

We tried to shake the powder off the paper. It didn’t come off. We turned the paper over and tried to wipe the powder off on the grass. It only smeared it and didn’t come off.

The students were able to see how air pollution messes up good things. They learned the importance of keeping the air clean. We talked about factories with smoke stacks that cause air pollution and how that smoke sometimes makes our air yucky to breathe and not healthy for our lungs.