Creating Food Together

 As we are heading into a Holiday of Feasting and Family, our stories and work in the PreK 4 classroom are reflecting all the excitement.  We are writing a book about Why We Are Grateful for our Families which includes comments and illustrations from each child.  We noticed that for the most part children are grateful for their families because they "just love them."

We have been practicing and performing our play, A Mushroom in the Rain  every day at the children's request and look forward to creating a video about the story.  We even had a chance to perform the story for assembly on Monday!  I think that was our favorite performance.  We do love an audience! 

There was a flannel board version of the story that the children enjoyed recreating-they all remained very true to the characters that they chose to be! 

We shared many crafts this week, wrapping sticks with yarn, pressing dried beans into salt dough, and making pretzels (yeast is a fungi!).  

 

We are reading Stone Soup,  and Pumpkin Soup, both books about cooperation and sharing. When we read Stone Soup,   we needed to discuss the fact that the villagers hid their food.  "I didn't like when the villagers hid their food."  We decided together to create OUR stone soup generously, and that everyone would give vegetables, rather than hide them.  The Stone Soup was a big event!  We asked for vegetables to be sent in and we had one hundred percent participation!  The vegetables were brought to the pot and chopped and talked about very proudly.   We created table"cloths" and place cards for our names, and ate the soup together.  Many of the children ate more than one serving!  We enjoyed sharing vegetables and cooking together, and exclaiming, "stone soup! the best you've ever tasted!"  

To begin with, we needed to go and find the perfect stone!

We spent some time setting our table, and then enjoyed our soup!

We are grateful!  

Enjoy your holiday....

Michele and Charlene

Science and Discovery in the PreK4 Classroom

 The inquiry approach in our PreK classroom allows us to listen and discover what our children are interested in and follow their interests to create our curriculum.  

We are currently discovering many things in the outdoors that the  children are asking questions about.  We collected and asked about nuts and created a guide book to the outdoors. Our interests have turned to FUNGI as they have become  more evident outdoors.  

To begin our process of discovery, we spent time looking outdoors and finding mushrooms.  This was our observation/documentation period. 

Once we had collected quite a few pictures, we also added some to our mossy terrarium, which the children are free to observe on the science table. 

As our discoveries increased, we asked the children what they WONDERED about mushrooms, and consulted an expert, Leiana, for information.  This is the INQUIRY portion of science in the classroom.  

We looked at guidebooks, observed mushrooms in nature, and read books about mushrooms as we continued our study.  We constructed a very large mushroom for our classroom and have decided that we are going to perform a story, The Mushroom .  We used recycled packaging to create the cap of our mushroom!  It's very colorful.....

Our questions were answered in part by Jesse, a Parker family member who loves mushrooms and was able to share their knowledge with us. He brought in pictures of SPORES from a microscope, and answered our many questions and share in our excitement about the wonders of the fungus kingdom.  

The result of our inquiry approach is still in progress: we will add to our Guidebook, create mushroom/fungi sculptures, and continue our hands on approach to answering our children's questions. Some of our discoveries included:

For our culminating activity, each child is given the opportunity to share what they have learned about mushrooms by creating and naming their own mushroom from recycled materials. 

While they are creating their mushrooms, they are describing all the parts of the mushroom.  "I need roots-mycelium."  "This is a puffball, it needs to be in a circle shape."  "This is JUST a mushroom."  

Having a very large mushroom to fit underneath certainly helps our imaginations!  Stay tuned.......

Until Next Time,

Michele and Charlene