Painting with Marbles

Painting with marbles is another great activity for preschool. As we are exploring primary and secondary colors, we have decided as a group to use primary colors for our finger paint and secondary colors for the marble paint.

Favorite Color Graph

Children love to make handprints and this is another project that uses handprints and a great way to graph favorite colors.

Ask each child to choose a favorite color.

Trace the child’s hand and ask the child to color the hand. Most of my students chose the “rubbing crayon" technique.

After all the hands were ready I placed them on a table to see the kids reaction in the morning of the next day. The children were looking for their handprints, placing their hands on them, comparing hand sizes and talking about the colors. I decided to leave the handprints there during the day for the kids to explore.

Later when I looked at the table this is what I saw. They had sorted the hands by color. They were also counting them.

 At last the graph is ready! 

Finger Paint

Today was a great messy day! It was finger paint day! This is a great project for preschoolers as the process is so much fun. We decided to use only the primary colors. It was also a good way to review what color we get when we mixed two primary colors. Investigating color is such a magical thing for young children. 

Snail Artists!!!

 
This week we had unusual artists painting in our classroom, SNAILS! It’s true! I saw this on a blog a long time ago and I thought it was so cool. Thanks Filth Wizardry for this idea! Here is the link to the original idea on Filthy Wizardry blog. http://www.filthwizardry.com/2008/05/snail-painting.html 

Paper Collage

There are so many art mediums to do collage but as this week we are exploring ‘colours’ we decided to use coloured paper as the sole art medium for our collages.

Making Clouds

Yesterday I read the book “It Looked Like Spilt Milk” by Charles G. Shaw. It is a great book to spark imagination as we wonder about shapes that we see in clouds.

NUMBER or LETTER?

Differentiating between numbers and letters is a great skill to develop in preschool. Here are some activities I do with my students.

Initially I work with the whole group with flash cards. I show a number or a letter and ask the children to tell me which one it is. If it is a number they will jump or clap the number, if it is a letter they will tell me something that start with that letter sound and act it out if appropriate.

On a different day I use the white board. I bluetack two circles (or draw) on the board, one for numbers and one for letters. Then I write a letter or a number outside the circles and the students tell me where to write it.

Then I erase it and write it in the correct circle. I do as many letters and numbers as I judge appropriate. This is also a good formative assessment tool.

As an individual activity I give each student a paper with two ‘cans’ drawn on it, one for numbers and one for letters. I also give them a strip of paper with numbers and letters mixed so they need to cut and paste in the correct can. You can also ask the students to find numbers and letters in old magazines.

Students were instructed to cut all letters and numbers before pasting them. They had a little container to place the bits of paper. I believe we need to teach students how to organize their work.

All students got one number or letter randomly from their little container to glue on the paper but this student in particular made a point of looking for all the numbers and glue them first and then he glued the letters.

The work below is from a student who glued all the numbers in order. She separated the numbers from the letters first then she got the smallest number, pasted it on the paper and added the others subsequently. 

Again it is fascinating for me to observe how each child carry on with the task. 

 Click on the picture below to download the worksheet.

If you are not using magazines like me assessment is the key to know which letters and numbers we give the students for this activity. After assessing my students I chose numbers 6, 9 the letter b, as well as the number 5 and the letter s. You need to assess the students to choose the right challenge for them. Every student at every level needs to be challenged but the task cannot be too difficult or it will be overwhelming.  I was happy to verify that my assessment was accurate and the students were up for the task.

Primary into Secondary Colors

Children love exploring colors. Turning primary colors into secondary colors is magical.