Change Can Be Funny

Today we had green lentils in the sensory table. One girl decided to stick her hand in, scoop a bunch of lentils out, and dump them on the floor. She's testing limits right now and every day we tell her to keep things in the table. We practice with her each and every day, repeatedly. First I reminded her to keep the lentils in the table. Then, out of sheer exasperation (warning: not-so-great teacher moment coming up here), I said, "The rule hasn't changed since the beginning of the year."

In her sweet little 3-year-old voice she replies:

"But change can be good, Patti!"

Sawdust, Wood, and Woodland Animals

Sometimes kids surprise you. Usually I think of the sensory table as a place to scoop, dig, dump, and build. With 2s and 3s it's easy to forget that some kids are ready for more imaginative play.

The other day I arrived to find someone had emptied out the sensory table. I forget what I had planned, but it was gone. Since I share a room with other teachers on alternate days, this sometimes happens. Looking in desperation for something safe for our student with allergies, I found a container of sawdust. It's actually more like small wood curls than sawdust.

Great, now what? More scoops and shovels? Wait, there were little logs that were part of a natual building set. I borrowed some of those and then headed to the cabinet where we keep animals. There was a box labeled "Woodland." I think it was a stretch to call some of those animals woodland creatures, but I wasn't feeling picky at the moment.

I WAS proud of myself that wood had figured in each element in the table even though no one else would notice (my co-teacher actually did, though). I realized that we'd have to add scoops later because the kids wouldn't know what to DO with animals, logs, and wood bits, but it looked nice to start with.

It turns out that the kids played with that setup all morning. They fed the animals, they build little homes out of the logs. They gave the animals dialogue. It was super to get such a reminder that sometimes they are ready to be more creative and that we don't have to make all the decisions for them.

A Conference Break

I'm taking a break from posting conference notes. Maybe I'll get back to it next week. We just do so much exciting stuff at school and the conference notes are probably more for me than for anyone else. I only have a few more sessions to write up though, so hopefully I can get it finished for my future reference.

Pole Bean Tipi/Teepee Hideout

The picture here is from a few years ago, but this is a yearly favorite of my kids at home. At school we don't really have a spot for this because there's already a nice garden. At home it moves year to year, always going to the spot where we think nothing else will grow.

So, what you've got here are three V-shaped trellises turned upside down and tied together making a 4-sided shape, roughly a tetrahedron, with one side open. We also hang yarn or string (something that will decompose eventually) horizontally around the structure so the bean plants have something to climb on. I don't bother with the careful preparation of the ground (gardeners, put down your scary-looking shovels for this blasphemy). I just dig a trench in front of the trellis, add some lose dirt, plant the beans, and water. The year this picture was taken we put cardboard underneath the tipi because whatever was growing there before gave my daughter a rash. It made it a nice place to hideout.

As for what to grow, choose any bean that will climb. I'm not a gardener and I couldn't find any seeds labeled "pole beans," (stop laughing, you gardeners out there) but I found lots of climbers. We like to plant colorful ones. Even though we eat beans at home I can't seem to get anyone interested in eating these beans. The kids love to pick the pods and shell them. They get used as play money, treasure, and whatever else seems like a good idea at the time. Purple beans are the most fun because of the unusual color for a food.

Some tips:

- Thin the bean plants! If you grow too many they will grow into the center of the structure, leaving no room for children. You'll also get pods that rot before they have a chance to make nice, fat, beans.

- Consider a larger structure. This tipi is really only big enough for one or two children at a time. We've used trellises up against the fence for a tunnel before and this year we're going to prop some up against our deck, which is high and has a nice secret space underneath.

- Weed and water, if necessary. While beans grow fast, the weeds seem to grow faster and will choke out the beans quickly if you don't stay on it. This is one time when the kids will weed for you because they want their tipi.

As I said, I'm not a gardener, but somehow this works for me every year. It's nice to have on a hot day and it teaches kids something about gardening without it being a crisis if the beans don't grow the way you want them to. If you are a gardener I'm sure there are lots of very good lessons just waiting to be learned with the tipi, but we mostly just enjoy ours. I'm hoping that having my kids learn to enjoy being with plants will motivate them to learn how to keep my house plants alive. *I* certainly don't know how to do it!

Note: I found two acceptable spellings of this structure, tipi and teepee. I don't know which is the preferred, so feel free to tell me.

Natural Egg Dye

While this won't be helpful for the Easter that's just over, you can pocket this idea away for next year. Last year we attempted to dye eggs with natural dyes. Since our class is only a half day, my co-teacher and I made several different colors out of various materials. Our thought was that most of the students would dye eggs at home with the kit you buy at the store and we could show them a different way of doing it.

Since the kids didn't see us make the dye the idea that we were doing something different was totally lost on them. My co-teacher decided that this year we would make dye with the kids. She found information on beets and red cabbage which coud be added to the egg cooking water. She cooked the cabbage for awhile at home and brought in a container of it so the kids could see it. The beets she brought in completely raw so she could cut them up and let the kids put the pieces in the pot.


So, with one pot of beets and another of cooked red cabbage, the kids carefully added raw eggs (yes, we washed hands after handling the eggs) and water to cover it all. Several kids decided to go with my co-teacher to put them on the stove. After the eggs were cooked we trooped down to the kitchen to see how it went.

The beet eggs came out a pretty mottled pink and the cabbage eggs were mottled light purple, also very pretty. Sadly, I didn't get any pictures of the finished eggs, so you'll have to take my word for it. We offered the eggs as part of snack. Most kids chose to try one, but as usual, the yolks were not popular.

I'm guessing we will do a variation of this activity again, so if you have any ideas, bring them on!

Allergy Note: If you have any egg allergies in class you should not do this activity. Instead, find other things to dye, like fabric or paper.

Note on the Picture Above: You can't see it in the photo, but there is an adult kneeling at the table mere inches away from the sharp knife on the table. No, we do not trust young two-year-olds with sharp knives, despite my desire to let them be independent.

Meaningful Measurements: Connecting Math and Science Standards with Favorite Literary Characters

Due to a lack of open parking garages in Indianapolis on a Saturday morning I missed the first few minutes of this session presented by Dr. Susie Beesley and Mrs. Abby Jadrich of Marian College. In those few minutes, I missed a lot! The rest of the session was so much fun I wish I had to learn about measurement all over again so I could learn it with these two women.

They started off by teaching measurement concepts while using Jack and the Beanstalk for material ideas. Some of the activities were to measure a standard object (our conference program) using beans, measuring that same thing with something that's always the same size, using each person's foot as a measuring device, measuring with one standard unit, and making rulers based on the standard unit.

For the second part of the class we did a measuring Olympics, where each person had to perform a certain task (shotputting a cotton ball, for instance), estimate the distance, and then measure it. The activities were fun, and we were fed chocolate at the end even if we didn't win an event (note to other presenters: bring chocolate and distribute it randomly throughout your presentation and we will all pay better attention).

The handouts included a long list of children's literature that could be used for measurement and science tie-ins. I found this to be an incredibly useful session. While my young 2s and 3s couldn't do most of the activities I certainly can think of some things to do with them that might introduce the concept of measurement that other teachers can build upon later when they're ready to learn more.

As far as I know our presenters did not give us contact information. Rather than searching it out and posting it when they may not want that, if you want to contact them I suggest you go to the Marian College website and search for them.

Earth Day 2009

So how did Earth Day go this year? Did you have any plans? What did you do?

We had planned to take the 2s out on a walk to collect trash. Even though it was a nice day the grounds were squishy and a fire drill rearranged our schedule for us. So we just spent extra time outside, watered our growing grass seed in the classroom, and did art that used colors found on our planet when viewed from space.

At my kids' elementary school they sang a few songs, picked up trash on the grounds, and planted more flowers than I can comprehend. I think it's great that the kids will now have some ownership over what the school looks like.

So, tell the world about your Earth Day!

My Mental Back Pocket

The Toddler's Busy Book, by Trish Kuffner, along with its predecessor Preschooler's Busy Book: 365 Creative Games & Activities To Occupy 3-6 Year Olds, are my "back pocket" books. By that I mean that I keep an idea or two from these books in my mental back pocket for when the class does the planned activities more quickly than I thought it would or when we need to change gears from the day's plan. Hopefully you can tell from the photo that my copy has been abused a bit over the years, so you know it gets used. Now that my own kids can read they'll look through it themselves and ask if we can do one or more of the activities they've done in the past.

I don't use this book for day-to-day planning, for the most part. It's the book I use when I need to be rescued. For awhile I kept it in my cabinet at school with pages bookmarked, but now I just refresh my mind periodically and keep some activities in waiting. I usually gather the materials needed in advance and just keep them in my classroom until we use them, but many of the activities are so easy to set up I can take a few kids with me to the supply room during the day to get what we need.

This book has plenty of art activities but also things you wouldn't think of as "activities" at all. At home my kids loved a game based on one from the book that they called "Balls, Balls, Balls" and simply involved tossing all our balls down the stairs, gathering them back up, and dumping them again. At school I like to use spring-loaded clothspins as a manipulative occasionally, which is an idea I got out of one of these books.

So what do you keep in your mental back pocket?

Garbage Garden

We recently asked our families to bring in things that might grow, specifically things hiding in the refrigerator or seeds from things they ate. Sprouted vegetables, squash seeds, you name it, we wanted it for our garbage garden.

We placed all the "garbage" items out in a tray. Some of them had to be cut, like carrot tops, and we waited until the children arrived before we did that. We set out dirt, spoons, and separated cardboard egg cartons. Our thinking is that if anything should grow, we can plant the little egg cartons directly in the children's garden in the play yard.

Along with the spelt berries we planted, we put out our garbage garden items daily for the kids to water. The children are really taking ownership of the grass seed. We didn't put it out on Wednesday of last week because we decided to have "dark day" (I'll post about that another time) and several of them asked about the plants.

At the time of this writing the grass plants are roughly 5-6 inches tall. It's very cool. On Monday one child decided to pull some up to see what was underneath. Good thing it's hardy stuff!