Today we finally got started on our new "preschool" year with our new curriculum. I really don't want to call it preschool, but at least you know what I'm talking about! I had planned to start yesterday, but because of the previous night's storms, everyone (myself included) was tired and lacking energy/motivation.

Our first theme is apples. Today we talked about the parts of the apple. Please note that I don't get overly technical on anything we do. We keep it simple and basic.

We are also trying something new with our theme-related art projects. In the past, this has always been a large group activity with all the kids sitting down at once to work on these. For at least the time being, we will be changing this to a small group activity, which means only a couple kids at a time will be working on the project. Because of the current ages and abilities of the kids, I feel this will allow me to better help each individual child. It will also allow me to easily modify the project for each child's abilities. Sometimes in the past the kids have had to wait to begin the next step of the project, and this should eliminate some of that as well.

Today we made a paper plate apple. We left the one side of the plate white, and used our fingers to dab brown paint dots for the seeds. We then painted the other side of the plate red. It looks like the apple has been cut in half, and reinforces the parts of the apple. Once they were dried, I used brown yarn (stem) to hang them in our windows.

Here's some photos I snapped today, since I didn't manage to get an activity plan posted this week. It's been a day-by-day sorta thing. Sorry, I accidently deleted the Messy Corner photo. Our current theme is Ocean Adventure.

We are also reviewing our basics this month. This was a very popular activity today, and I was told it's very cool with the light coming through the paper! The green bin is holding shape stencils, half sheets of paper, and markers and colored pencils. They didn't just limit themselves to the actual shape, which is what I was hoping for. Some of the pictures they made using whichever shape got pretty creative! 

 At our art table we had ocean animal foam stampers. Bev also discovered today that it's time to replace these stamp pads. Provider's hint: Put out the extra money for the large-size pads. These small ones aren't quite big enough for these stampers.  

These two discovered the dancing ribbons in with the scarves today. We were playing an ocean CD during free play today. However, I'm sure no one is surprised to hear that these two, because the ribbons are orange, red, and yellow, began to make fire movements instead!

Busy, busy children!

It was also very exciting today when it got warm enough to open up the outside water table!

So after Circle Time, where we had a discussion about rainbows and their colors and how the colors are in certain order, we set about making our own rainbow pictures. We used a rainbow pattern, paint and q-tips to paint the rainbow, a sun pattern, blue rice for the raindrops, and cottonballs for the clouds. They could make their picture however they wanted using whatever materials they wanted, although I did have a couple rainbow patterns available that I had colored for the older ones who would want to get the colors in the right order.

The finished products:

Note below Colby and Aiden's names. The first two C's in the corner was Colby trying to figure out how to write his name in the corner (his choice of location, by the way), so the two C's were his first two attempts. He then determined that there was not enough room to write it in that direction, so he chose to write it backwards...including the letters! Aiden then determined that this was the perfect solution, and followed suit.

The next day, we continued the rainbow theme. Since we had leftovers from yesterday's project, I  just added construction paper in the rainbow colors, and let them do whatever they wanted.

I also added some of my colored rainbow patterns by the easel. I also mentioned during storytime that each side of the easel had three colors from the rainbow. If you needed a color from the other side, you would have to ask nicely to trade colors with your friend painting on the other side. It was not only a lesson in manners and sharing, but cooperation and strategy as well, as they would also have to what color their friend needed or was done with, to determine which colors to trade. I said nothing about what to paint, just pointed out that these were colors from the rainbow.