Moo cows

We made these lovely cows towards the end of our farm unit. The students learned about the different parts of the cows and where milk comes from. They glued together the cows and then used letter stamps to use the letters of their names to make the spots. It worked really well and was a good activity for learning to spell their names, which we have been working on lately.

Shake shake shake.

Yesterday we made butter! I made a playlist of shaking on my iPod and we had a shaking party. It was surprisingly easy. All you do is take a little bit of heavy whipping cream and shake it up! We used the ziploc bags that have two zippers, but I've also seen it done with a mason jar. I added a little bit of salt and left over honey from when we studied bees to give it a little flavor. The kids shook their bags for 25 minutes, then we put the butter in the fridge to harden and set. We had it for afternoon snack and it was a hit!

Pepper prints and salsa

Today we continued on with our farm and learning about what grows on a farm. Because my students love salsa, we made our own. I love cooking with my students. I do it often because I personally cannot cook. I like the idea that I can get a three year old into cooking so they won't turn into me: A 24 year old who is about to go out to eat because no one is home to cook for me. We used an onion, a red pepper, and a tomato, along with other spices. I cut up the vegetables, and the students put those vegetables into my food processor. Then we all took turns pushing the "pulse" button on the food processor. This is, by far, their favorite part of cooking.
Tada! Chips and salsa. It wasn't the world's greatest salsa, but it did spur a discussion about how we could make it better next time. And if that's not creating little cooks, I don't know what is.

We also did some painting, because I love painting almost as much as I love cooking. We took an extra green pepper, cut it in half, and used it to stamp on the paper.
This is my example to show them what they were going to be doing.

This is what most of them did! I love how I can always depend on my students to use whatever I give them to paint with to cover the entire sheet of paper. They had fun though, and that's the part that matters! And they can all tell you where our vegetables come from: "The farm!"

001: Aw shucks, you caught us being corny

As a preschool teacher, I find that blogs can sometimes be my best source of inspiration and craft ideas. I read many other blogs and finally got to thinking "Hey, me too!" I may also eventually give out this blog website to my students' parents, and let them see the thought process that goes behind the many, many art projects we do in class. We'll see how well this turns out first! And by that, I mean how often I actually keep up with this blog. I don't have the best blogging reputation.

So we'll start here. Our current theme at the preschool is "The Farm." I love farm animals, but I also love teaching students what a farm is for! Our science activity for Friday was shucking corn. We used this as a vocabulary lesson also. The students learned words like "ear," "shuck," "husk," and "stalk." The shucking took quite nearly 20 minutes and the kids were completely invested in the whole concept. I even had one extra ear of corn, because of an absent student, and had students clamoring to shuck that ear! I loved the look of amazement on their faces when they realized that I was actually telling the truth! There is corn under all that husk. We were unable to cook the corn that day. Because we were shortstaffed in the preschool, I was unable to run to the kitchen and boil it. I did send it home though, and I hope the parents cooked it!

After we were done shucking, we used the extra husks to paint! Painting is a much more rewarding experience for children when they are allowed to paint whatever they please. In preschool, we often forget this for the sake of making something that the parents and people coming in on tours will think is adorable and cute. It was great to watch how my students differed when they used the husks. Some held it like a paint brush and used it to spread the paint around. Others used it like a stamp, putting an entire length of it in the paint before pressing it flat on to the paper. Everyone loved it! I only let two students paint at a time, because I was doing this activity during center time at the art center. I had a line of students waiting to come do their painting. We used yellow and red paint in order to incorporate more learning, because then the students could see how the paint changed to orange as it mixed together.

I loved this activity and will definitely be doing it again next year.