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I've said it before and I will say it again, I absolutely love the STEAM opportunities that Experience Early Learning is providing this year. There are different STEAM lessons that teachers can include into their preschool lesson plans every week. These are available under your member resources that you have access to when you order your curriculum. This week one of our STEAM activities was color mixing. This was a great opportunity to talk about basic color mixing, like Red+Blue=Purple, Blue+Yellow=Green, etc. For this lesson we used red and blue.
I asked them what we could do if we wanted purple paint but didn't have any. We can be resourceful and use the colors we do have to make the color we want. I hung up the tie-dye photos, gave each child a coffee filter, paint brush, and liquid watercolors. This activity called for rubber bands and since we didn't have any we did it a little bit differently (another great thing with this curriculum is that you can easily change it up if needed). The children dipped their paintbrush into the liquid watercolors and watched as the paint spread on their coffee filter. I then asked them what happened when the colors mixed. They loved watching the colors spread across the coffee filter as soon as they dripped their paint on it.
These turned out really pretty. You can see the blue, red and the purple that was made when the two colors met on the coffee filter. Experience Early Learning has a lot of hands-on activities that make learning fun. At this age curriculum should be play-based, and that is exactly what Experience Early Learning offers your preschool classroom with their Experience Preschool curriculum. Your preschooler is learning in all content areas!
We added one more experiment that included milk, dish soap, liquid water color and a cotton ball. I filled a bowl with milk (enough to cover the bottom of the bowl), added a few drops of the liquid watercolor to the middle of the bowl - it is important that the liquid watercolor stays in the middle of the bowl for it to work the best, and then we made predictions - What do you think will happen if we put a cotton ball in the bowl, on top of the liquid watercolor? What do you think will happen if we dip the cotton ball into dish soap before putting it in the bowl?
We dipped a cotton ball into dish soap and then put it in the bowl on top of the watercolor. The watercolor immediately spread. They loved the reaction! After we did it as a group I gave each child their own bowl to do the experiment on their own. I think it is important for them to get to experiment on their own to really get a lot from it. This experiment called for a Q-Tip, but this was a last minute plan so again, I used what I had and the cotton ball worked just as well.
Kids in the Kitchen!
I have planned Kids in the Kitchen once a month, the last Thursday and Friday in order for all classes to get to participate. On the menu for September was English Muffin Pizzas! Before we got started we talked about kitchen and food safety, how we wash our hands before touching food and after eating, and then we talked about their favorite toppings on pizza. I gave each child an English muffin, sauce, cheese and they had the choice of adding pepperoni to their pizza if they wanted. They loved being hands-on with their snack! This was a fun experience for them and they already can't wait for next months Kids in the Kitchen experience.
Until next week!
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