Fun Fun Fun Week!

Fun, Fun, Fun Week was filled with "fun" learning activities!  The children experimented with eye droppers and colored water to create new colors.  

 They strung Cheerios, pretzels and beads to make necklaces.

They requested a return of our special pop corn popper.  Watching the pop corn pop is almost as much fun as eating it! 

They ate "big" pieces of Watermelon for snack, demonstrating "how it drips"!  This will make more sense to you when you attend our last day presentation!

At Story Time they listened to felt board fairy tales, and stories from their favorite author, 

Kieko Kasza.

A return visit from Baby Mikka was an additional highlight of the week.  

Perhaps most fun of all was our field trip to the Bethlehem Town Park Playground.  The weather was nearly perfect and the children had a "perfectly" grand time!

Happy Summer Birthday to Cate, Declan, Maple, Harriet and Marie!

Thank you to Grant's dad, Scott for coming in as our Guest Reader during Fun, Fun, Fun Week!

Looking Deeper:  Exploration and Learning through Play

This Week let's take a closer look at the "fun" of play!

As mentioned above, this week was filled with a wide variety of activities, some new, some back by popular demand, but all Fun, Fun, Fun!  One characteristic that these activities had in common was the fact that they were multi-layered in skill focus, and provided the children with a "review" of many skills and facts that we focused upon over the course of the year!

The children excitedly mixed colored water every day this week and never tired of creating new colors.  They experienced this activity as playful and fun, but as is always the case with play, it was so much more!  Manipulating an eye dropper was a new learning experience for many of the children.

They spontaneously reviewed and exclaimed that blue and yellow made green, that red and yellow made orange, and that blue and red made purple.  Additionally, Spanish was utilized from time to time as a child was heard to exclaim; I made verde....... anaranjado.......morado!

Stringing Cheerios and pretzels is a fun fine motor activity that quickly morphed into a Math lesson as the children began counting the number of Cheerios and pretzels that were on their strings, and discerned who had more and/or most.

Stringing colored beads provided experimentation with Math concepts of greater complexity as the children instinctively began to form patterns with the colored beads!

Science concepts were reviewed as we talked once again about how and why a kernel of corn expands when heated and eventually "pops," turning into something delicious!   Before we knew it,  we were discussing Social Studies as the children remembered and articulated that the Native Americans made pop corn while sitting around their camp fires!

The children demonstrated their knowledge and love of literature as they requested their favorite stories by a beloved author!

The children delighted in the exercise of social and gross motor skills as they played on our Field Trip to the Bethlehem Town Park Playground!

Play is fun!  Play is a source of great joy!  Play is also a wonderful vehicle of  learning for children and adults of all ages!  Remember to always take time, and/or make time to Play!

Have a fun and restful weekend!