March 10-14, 2014

The children continue their explorations with cooking and baking in their Daisy's Diner.  They have talked a lot about ingredients, recipes and food preparation.  They have also begun to explore different ways to cook and bake.  The following pictures show the children creating their own pizzas using ingredients that they decided on as a group.  This process also is a great setting for the children to collaborate together and discuss the process.  They have many great conversations.

The next several pictures show how the flower bouquet is used as a provocation to inspire the children.  They have become very interested in focusing on color and details.  Before we even got started, there were conversations that took place about what color paint we needed, what type of brushes we were going to need and where we might start on our painting.  Some children even decided to use their fingers as a tool.  The finished products were very thoughtful and beautiful.  We even displayed some of them in our Daisy's Diner as artwork.

The following are pictures of the children doing more explorations using paint.  They are using different colors of tempera paint and also different materials to paint on.  They were using tin foil to see how the paint looks on this material and also how it feels.

The children have shown an interest in different literacy skills.  They have been interested in writing their name, sounding out letters and even trying to write words.  Here is a sample of what they have been working on.  They got to pick a book and then had to try to write some words from that book.  

We continue our explorations of animals and building structures for the animals.  The children have been very creative picking different materials to build with.  They have used Legos, Magnet-Tiles and blocks (just to name a few).  Most of the time they build, they incorporate the toy animals we have in our room.  We recently started drawing blueprints to hopefully build our very own classroom zoo.  Since animals seems to be a very strong curiosity for the children, we have gradually added some real animals into our classroom.  We now have 5 hermit crabs.  We are discussing their habitats, the way they move and also what we need to do to ensure we keep the animals safe and healthy.

The children recently talked about providing 'show's to our Daisy's Diner.  We decided as a class to start using puppets to try out the performing arts.  They continue to enjoy anything that has to do with dramatic play.