Thursday, April 2, 2009

Water and Wheels!

This week we studied the sound of Willie Weasel. We focused our activities around wheels and water. I wanted to teach the children a little about the water cycle. First we made clouds and then did an experiment showing how clouds let out the rain. Each child had a tray of water and a dry cotton ball. They dipped their cotton ball in the water until it was full of water. When they lifted it up, it "rained".
We also briefly talked about evaporation....which I just explained as how water disappeared into the clouds. I also heated up a bowl of water in the microwave and let the children feel the heat coming off the water. Then we covered the bowl with plastic wrap and noticed the steam collecting on the wrap and then the beads of water will drip down in the bowl just like rain!
Here are our clouds, raindrops and water chart.
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Here we made a word web for wheels and cut out pictures from newspaper ads that had wheels.
The children loved sorting the vehicles by the number of wheels.
We also did some water-color painting. Chase and I created secret messages with a white crayon...the water-color paint would make the secret word/picture magically appear! Addy and Kylie are creating masterpieces with their water-color.
We also painted with different size/texture wheels. The designs were really cool!
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learning objectives: begins to perform simple investigations; compares objects and identifies similarities and differences; begins to observe changes in weather