Earth Day Art

We are doing some work with earth day in school today and tomorrow we are taking in some local festivities - an earth day event at the Tacoma Nature Center and the Parade of the Species in Olympia. Should be a great time!

With school we have read a few books on earth day from the library, worked in our garden, created an earth day booklet and did an earth art project. The earth art project is very cool - you take a photo copy of an earth coloring sheet and tape down. Then lay a piece of clear contact paper sticky side up over the earth color sheet, tape down. Using blue and green tissue paper fill in the earth, as if coloring with tissue paper. When completed cover the earth shape with another piece of contact paper sticky side down and seal up well. Then trim out your earth and you have a fantastic window art piece!

Outdoor Play

I realized the other day I don't share the more laid back parts of our learning -- unstructured, natural outdoor play! We enjoy a ton of this... in which I tend to put on our personal blog. However, I wanted to include that we enjoy a LOT of outdoor park play, natural play and sport play. As the weather is turning to a more comfortable temperature I will include more of our play over here at this blog. In the mean time, yesterday we enjoyed outdoor play at a favorite local park with friends for a couple of hours - it was a great, messy day!

Sunflower Paper Pots

A fun project to go with our plant unit, Spring and gardening in general are the newspaper starter pots we made. These are so, so easy to do and fun! When your seeds sprout you just put the paper pots right into the ground and the newspaper will decompose into the soil. Here are the steps to create these little pots.

You take a 1/2 sheet of newspaper (not glossy) and fold in half length wise.

Place a small cup on the sheet about 1/2 way across.

Next, roll the paper around the cup - not too tightly, not too loose either.

Once rolled the end will look like thisTuck all the end bits up into the cup.

Remove the cup.

Push the tucked in bits back down flat to create the bottom of your pot.

You are done!!! Create, add dirt and seeds ~ Enjoy! We planted mammoth sunflowers... I have a ton of seeds and a strong feeling we will be in sunflower heaven later this summer.

Math Art Project

Coming up with some fun or creative ways to do things... can be challenging. I read a ton of books, blogs, websites and articles to find some fun ways to spice up life with school. This was a fun one I found a while back. We finally had time to include it in our day, theme and Holly really enjoyed it!

I placed four numbers on the center of flowers and then created leaves that had addition problems working with those numbers. Holly then used those to cut and create a large picture of flowers. The leaves on the stem of each flower were the math problems that matched that flower. So, we were able to tie in some artwork with our math review. It was a lot of fun, very colorful and works great with Spring and our plant unit we are enjoying.

I think it turned out pretty cute!

New Dice

We recently added new dice to our math and game collection. The dice will add a fun new level of addition and subtraction for Holly... with even higher numbers to introduce. I am loving these dice because they have a plus/minus sign one that Holly can add to her play. Here is just a sample of one math sheet she worked on. A fun way to practice math!

Fine Motor Game

We recently came upon this fantastic little fine motor game from HABA. It is wooden, small for travel and perfect for some fine motor skills work. I adore the simplicity of it, freedom to create without rules and basic materials. Holly has been having a lot of fun with this new game. She has practiced building pictures, creating designs and patterns as well as designing all letters and numbers - just some fun ways to play with it.

Flower Investigation

Part of our plant unit is to take a plant and investigate it -- find all the basic parts, study it, journal it, work on our project sheets, etc. I took Holly to the nursery and she chose a little pink Primrose flower for her investigation.

We placed the plant in a large dish to help contain the dirt mess. She used her magnifying glass, a brush and small stick to carefully break it apart and find various bits of the plant. She added this flower to her nature journal, completed the sheet on the plant finding the various parts of the plant and drawing a diagram of it and then we replanted it.

As simple as this was, she loved it!