Space Discovery 2013

 Our space discovery session was lots of fun, and I was very pleased to see some new Mountaineers (our pre-school visitors) start their visits today. 

There is a huge amount to learn about space and unfortunately one discovery session is not enough to learn about all of it. 

So today we just discovered about a small part of space. Here are a few of our favourite activities.

We could blast off to outer space in colourful shape rockets. 

 The children wrote each letter of their name on a square. This clever child wrote his surname too!

 Once you reach the moon you can collect moon rocks or meteorites. 

 (Our meteorites are really river rocks covered in silver paint and plenty of glitter.)

 These toilet roll rockets have flames shooting out the bottom just like real rockets.

 Some children enjoyed sitting on a cushion to read our special space library books. 

We also enjoyed watching video clips on You Tube. Here are a couple of favourites:

(I love this song!)

Skip Counting Eggs

During their first year at school children are beginning to skip-count. Skip counting is the start of multiplying. This term we have been learning to skip count in 2's. 

Our birds nests with two eggs in each nest are helping us learn to skip count.

We made these beautiful marbled eggs with shaving cream! 

 Squirt enough shaving cream into your tray for your paper to cover.

 

Drop several blobs of paint on to shaving cream. We used two colours for each tray.

 Stir the paint and shaving cream together. We found that we needed to stir the mixture quite a bit, but not too much or it will blend into one colour instead of a marbled look.

Press the paper face down onto the shaving cream and paint. I used these printed eggs, but you could also marble plain pieces of paper then draw on a picture or just cut it up to use in other art work.

 

 Scrape off the shaving cream with a ice-block stick, and leave the print to dry.

We used lots of different blends of colours for our eggs. We found that you can get several prints from each tray of shaving cream. And as a bonus all of our eggs smell nice!

We have also been reading this cute poem about eggs.

What a Racket!

For Discovery this morning we explored sound. Here are a few photos of us experimenting with different materials to create sounds. 

 

 

 (You can see what my favourite sweet treats are at the moment.)

Turtle Printmaking

A special visitor came to our classroom today - Melvin the Turtle. Melvin is 5 years old, is a red eared slider turtle, and despite the rather masculine name we found out that Melvin is a girl. 

We spent a long time looking carefully at Melvin and she spent a long time looking carefully at us! We found out that Melvin likes eating her special frozen turtle food, she likes warm water and has a special heater in her tank, Melvin has sharp claws and her shell feels very hard.

In honour of Melvin we made turtle prints using a cooking pot! I used this post for inspiration.


To Make a Turtle Print:

Use printing ink to roll the bottom of a cooking pot or cake pan, then scratch a turtle shell pattern into the ink. We made sure to scratch quite firmly with our ice-block sticks so we could see the bottom of the pan through the ink.

Push the pot onto the paper.

Carefully lift off the pot and peel away the print. We made two prints; one for school, and one to take home.

Use finger prints for the flippers. We used a head shaped piece of card for the head, you could also try a milk bottle lid. 

During the week we watched several You Tube clips about baby sea turtles hatching.

We enjoyed reading this book about baby sea turtles and how to look after them.

I love printmaking with children, but you do have to be organised. Sometimes one piece of art will take several sessions, so different equipment or materials will be needed for each lesson. I always complete a printmaking activity with small groups. That way the majority of mess is contained, and as most printing involves special art equipment (often in limited numbers) there is not always enough for everyone to use at once. Small groups of children just make it easier.

Check out some of our other printmaking activities:

Matariki star sponge prints

Apple prints

Fingerprint shamrock cards

Footprint bees

Bubble art

Graham Braddock Art

Look at what Jane from Graham Braddock Art taught us to draw.

A penguin at the beach!

Everyday Superheroes

We had an influx of heroes in J-Block this morning. Some children came dressed in costume for our Everyday Superheroes Discovery session, while others turned into heroes during the session. 

But superheroes are not just characters on TV or in the movies, there are everyday heroes all around us. Today, our everyday heroes were;

 Busy working in the police station,

Taking fingerprints,

Making firefighter helmets,

Completing emergency 111 books, 

Filling out emergency incident forms,

Turning into nurses,

Saving lives and treating dolls, 

And making superhero masks. 

 

'No photos please!'

Buzzing Bees

 Here is the start of something special ....

.... these gorgeous footprint bees.

 They are busy buzzing around our classroom. 

 We have been watching, reading, writing, and talking about honey-bees. 

We saw this amazing You Tube clip showing a queen bee laying eggs in her hive. The worker bees stroke and lick her while she lays the eggs. We found out that when the eggs turn into larvae the worker bees feed them honey and bee milk.

The Fat Bee Man showed us how bee-keepers get the honey out of the honeycomb. And we enjoyed taste testing two different types of honey - runny honey and creamed honey. 

We wrote these bee facts:

 

The bees make honey in the hive. Bees keep the honey in the honeycomb.

Bees make honey to feed the larvae.

The queen bee lays the eggs. The worker bees give the queen royal jelly.

The bee stings with his stinger. It really hurts.

First the bee is an egg and it turns into a larvae. It turns into a pupa and then it’s a bee!