Pitter Patter

Pitter Patter, Pitter Patter

Look at all the rain

Knocking on the windowsills

And on the Windowpane

Sounding like the pitterpat of little fairy feet

Running down the garden path and running down the street

Washing everybody's house and everybody's shop

Pitter Patter, Pitter Patter

When's it going to stop?

This week, the rain brought a change of pace to our normal schedule. Instead of heading outdoors right after our morning meetings, we stayed inside and spent some time exploring new art concepts and techniques as a class! On Monday, the class enjoyed learning about color theory by observing the color wheel and experimenting with mixing primary colors to create secondary colors. As they explored, they noticed how adding more or less of each color could create different shades of purple, orange, or green, and some children began inventing their own names for colors that they created (e.g. "living green," "muddy purple," and "sunset orange"). We looked at some of the names of crayons in our crayon bin as insipration, and tried to think of our own interesting words to describe colors we mixed.

After talking about the beauty of color, we decided to read the story of the Rainbow Fish. Not only did this spark a wonderful discussion about friendship, kindness and sharing, but it provoked a lovely guided art experience as well. This class has loved our "directed drawings" in the past, but this was our first directed painting! We first discussed how the rainbow fish looks from the side, and discussed the shapes of its body, fins, lips, eye and scales as each child drew the outline of their own fish with black marker. Then we decorated them with watercolors and explored the interesting effect that takes place when we sprinkle salt on our watercolor painting! Lastly, we cut up some small pieces of tin foil to add in a few sparkly scales. Some children also added in their own unique ideas inspired by the story, such as the little blue fish or the octopus's cave. We were amazed at how beautiful and unique each masterpiece turned out!

Another art technique we explored was "Black Glue- Line Paintings". We began by looking at photographs of all kinds of flowers, and each child picked their own favorite flower to draw with pencil on their watercolor paper. Then, they traced their outlines with a mixture of black paint and glue and let it dry. This week, we are beginning the process of coloring in the flower with watercolor paints! We cannot wait to show you the results! :)

Other highlights of the week included:

* Celebrating Ivy's 6th birthday!! The class worked so hard to create a beautiful birthday banner for her and Ivy invited a few of her friends to help her decorate her birthday crown. We loved seeing pictures of Ivy through the years and hearing her tell stories of the memories her pictures evoked.

* Playing with number through our "flower petal math" experience. Children practiced reading the numerals in the middle of each flower and counting out that many gems to use as flower petals. Some also used the blank flowers to practice writing their own numerals for the activity, and some even experimented with writing their own "number stories" e.g. 4 petals + 5 petals = 9 petals.

* Rainy day science: We started the week by asking the children for their ideas about where rain comes from. They all pooled their collective prior knowledge and collaboratively did a beautiful job describing what they knew about the water cycle! We elaborated on this a bit more and a couple of simple stories about rain and clouds that illustrated parts of the water cycle as well. Then, we filled a jar with water and put a dollop of shaving cream on top to represent the cloud. we dripped some blue food coloring on top one drop at a time and observed how as the cloud gets heavier with more and more water, it begins to come down underneath (as rain). The class loved adding more drops and observing the visual effect of rain falling from the clouds.

* And of course, we loved getting outside and jumping in muddy puddles at every opportunity we could!

All in all, we had a wonderful rainy week. :)