Five for Friday

This week has been a bit of a whirlwind.  We're starting to wind down the school year, and we only have 2 1/2 weeks left of school...YIKES!!!  The last week of school technically doesn't count because it's full of field trips, fun activities ('cause we don't do them the rest of the school year, haha) and the last day, families are invited to come in for the afternoon.  I have a slideshow planned, along with an activity for families to do together with the children, and plan to pass out certificates so parents can take pictures.

Now it's time for Five for Friday with Doodle Bugs Teaching, and I can't believe the week has come and gone already!

{One} Science in preschool is all about investigating the world around us...right down to the little details we tend to forget we learned about when we were young children.  Since we've been talking about rainbows, we decided to do a color experiment.  First we talked about the color of plain water, then added food coloring (red, blue, yellow) to three cups of water.  The other three cups were left empty.  Then, we took paper towel and put it between all of the cups to let the colored water absorb into the paper towel to go into the empty cups.  When the water goes into the empty cups, they make new colors (purple, orange, green)!  We quickly found out this is a S-L-O-W process...

...so we decided to revisit this later.  This is what it looked like the following day.  It took about 3 days for the water to evenly distribute through the cups, but was a great experiment to discuss and make predictions.

{Two}  I set the experiment off to the side on the counter and then made up new cups of colored water for the children to mix together to find out what colors they could make.  They really enjoyed mixing the colors, and even asked questions like "I wonder what would happen if we mixed purple and yellow?"  For the sake of this experiment we did not mix those colors, but I put this activity out at a center for them to explore the following week to discover the answer for themselves.

{Three}  One of my favorite centers in the classroom is the Listening Center (this is what we use our computers for).  I read the story Froggy Builds a Treehouse by Jonathon London a few weeks ago when we were learning about frogs.  I always read the story first because I believe it's important for children to hear how good readers sound, to see the expressions on my face as I am reading, and to get them interested in wanting to listen to the story before I put it in this center.

{Four}  This was probably my favorite art project we have done all year!  We had leftover strips of paper from when we made our rainbows, so we used it to make caterpillars.  The kids used the 10 second gluing rule to hold down the strips, then added eyes, and used plastic forks (straight ones work the best) to make the grass.  We talked about what color caterpillars can be, and what color grass is...then I told them they could make their art whatever color they wanted.  I LOVE how they turned out!!!

{Five}  The preschool teacher across the hall was playing this video, and I couldn't resist playing this for my own kids and dancing along with them.  They love the minions from Despicable Me, and we tried to dance like the characters in the movie while we were singing along with the song.  This makes a great brain break for any age to get them up and moving!