Clay, Crepes, and Shadows

Art
First Steps into Clay: Stage One began this week.

It's said that before working with clay as an art medium, children need to understand its identity. This first step, emphasizes full-body exploration. We stripped the children to bare feet and arms and encouraged them to jump in and explore. They did not know how to begin, and were quite tentative. I invited the children to climb on to the large block of clay, dig into it with their toes--only Lulu and Mia accepted the invitation to stand on it. I told them, "go ahead, stomp into the clay with your feet!" The others used their fingers, and we even tried some elbows. Lulu also tried sitting on it to see if that would work. So, they experienced the responsiveness of the clay--they saw the clay was strong and could hold them up. When I asked Mia, "can you lift the clay?", she tried and said, "it's TOO heavy!" She then realized though, that she could roll the clay over. When I asked Corbin if he wanted to stand on the clay, he said, "I'm too short."

Next week, we'll begin stage two of the clay exploration, which will be moving the clay to the tables and we'll work with individual chunks.

Science/Nature
We focused on Shadows last week. We read It's a Sunny Day and also looked at the Shadow Section in our Nature-A Child's First Library of Learning book. We then went outside and made shadows with our hands and bodies. The children were excited to find their shadows in the grass and also know that their shadow disappears when they are in the shade.

Culinary
On Wednesday, we made Apple Crepes. The children took turns stirring in the ingredients. Too bad Ms. Andrea burned half of them, but there was one crepe which was salvageable, so the children enjoyed a slice while we were outside.

Yoga Snippets

Next Week
Our focus next week will be on Spreading Love.

P.S. And if you don't already know, the property, is a no go.
It's all on my personal blog if you care to read about it. I feel like a broken record talking about it.

*le sigh*

P.P.S. Oh, lookie what arrived yesterday afternoon!!

We have a Light Table!!
Sophia and Lulu have been exploring it all morning. There are countless possibilities for learning on this.

Blocks, Light and Shadows

Highlights of our Day

Damon and Lulu explored the Brown Stairs and the Pink Tower. After lining the brown tower in order from biggest to smallest, I turned the largest block a 90 degree angle, and then Damon immediately exclaimed, "Oh! A TRAIN!", so we decided to turn the rest at that angle, and we lined them up from largest to smallest. I continue to coach the children on using these particular [Montessori] materials (they like to build with them and tend to want to knock them over but these particular blocks aren't designed for that). They can certainly build and stack with these, just not knock them over (they're heavy). We use our regular wood block for that type of fun. =)The children also explored the cylinder knobs and since I have two, they got some good practice in on taking turns since each child likes to complete these independently.





While we were outside, Lulu was noticing her shadow, so I took that opportunity to talk with the children about shadow and what causes it. Then they all wanted to make shadows in the sand. This is good because we're going to be doing a lot of explorations with light very soon here!



Corbin enjoys pouring sand on the ledge of the sandbox and pushing the toy trucks through it. (He LOVES these toy trucks and cars). Also found him drawing circles in the sand.





Lots of gross motor running and chasing each other with the playsilks.



Our anticipated Napkin Art from this week:


A full spread today!

Mark, I keep meaning to tell you my son, Domi, thinks your napkin art is the coolest thing!

Emergent People





Art by Lulu


More fingerpaint exploration (and a pic from yesterday too).







Even though I don't do a 'Christmas theme', (you won't find your child gluing cotton balls on a cartoon cutout of Santa here) since I prefer to leave holidays to be a family affair, however, next week, I thought it would be nice to go along with our focus of LOVE, to make some St. Lucy Buns. So we'll be doing some culinary work next week in addition to our explorations.

*Editing to add note about blog readers*
There may be a couple readers who have expired 'permissions'. I think what happens is, if you don't log in with a google/gmail account, you can view the blog as a guest, but it's temporary and apparently auto expires after a month? I think a couple grandparents may be offlist now, but please let me know who, so I can add them back on, but they'll need to use a a google or gmail account if they want to be able to log in after the month is over.

~Andrea