Stripey fish!

I forgot to take after pictures of this one. We have been working on simple patterns lately and our new May theme of water afforded the opportunity to make pattern fish! I gave the students two colors of paint, showed them a few patterns, and said "Now, can you make a pattern?" Almost all of them did really well. Even when the pattern wasn't clear on the plate they were painting, it was clear to me that they were doing one stroke in color A, then switching to one stroke in color B. After the paint dried, I cut out the white parts of the plate. The students added a side fin and a tail fin and we hung them up in the hallway from the ceiling. My neighbor and I are aiming to create a school of fish going down our hallway.

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.