Happy New Year!

Sending out wishes to all for a wonderful, healthy, and loving new year! Enjoy reading the linked blog post on a new year's list for tired parents.

http://takomacooperativeschool.org/2010/12/a-new-years-list-for-tired-parents/

Happy Holidays!

Singing among snowflakes! The teachers and Board of Directors wish all of our families, current and past, a wonderful holiday season!

Keeping active during cold weather

It's fun to walk like a crab!

It's been awhile since I've posted here. We've been so busy doing lots of fun things! We celebrated Thanksgiving with lots of fun activities! Recently the weather has been very cold and that keeps us from going outside to play. We have to find fun things to do inside that will stretch our large muscles and use up some of that "holiday" energy! We're very lucky to have had a visit from a local gymnastics coach for children. He did some great activities with the children to burn up some of that excess energy while focusing on their listening skills and following directions.

This is our last week of school before winter break. The children will soon be delighting the parent audience with some winter tunes at our annual winter concert! It's so hard to believe that the first semester is nearly over! Looking forward to a fun, educational, and adventurous second semester!

Fun with Science!

Cornstarch and water is so much fun!

Playing with helium balloons and weights.

Our four's class has been investigating science this week. They've studied gravity and air, solids and liquids, and chemical reactions. We've mixed cornstarch and water, played with vinegar and baking soda, and had one of our dad's come in to explore gravity with the children! It's been a busy week!





One of our favorite activities this week was making Irish Soda Bread. After exploring what happens when you mix vinegar and baking soda together, we made the bread. If the bread turns out right, which ours did, then the children will see holes in the baked bread very similar to the holes left in the baking soda after dripping the vinegar onto the soda.





Irish Soda Bread





Ingredients:


1 cup milk


1 teaspoon vinegar


2 cups flour


1/2 teaspoon salt


1/2 teaspoon baking soda





Preheat oven to 400 degrees


Mix milk and vinegar in cup and set aside for about 10 minutes. This will curdle the milk.


In the bowl, stir together the flour, salt, and baking soda.


Stir the milk mixture into the flour mixture until smooth.


Scrape the dough out of the bowl onto a floured surface.


Form dough into disk shape and put into pan.


Bake for approximately 15 minutes.





Have the children observe the air pockets in the bread. Discuss how the mixing of the baking soda and vinegar created bubbles. The bubbles in the bread happened to become stuck in the dough.

Spiders, Spiders, Everywhere!

It's always fun to build a human spider web!

Busy October!

We've been having lots of fun this October! All of the classes have visited the local pumpkin patch/apple orchard. The 3's and the 4's classes visited the local fire department's fire safety activities during the first week of October. They had lots of fun watching and participating in the puppet show, learning about crawling low in smoke, practicing stop, drop, and roll, and many other activities.

In the 4's class we spent the entire week learning about fire safety, doing science activities about fire, and lots of art! One of the science activities the class enjoyed was taking a candle, lighting it, and putting a jar over it to watch the fire go out. Really demonstrates to them that oxygen is one of the things needed for fire to burn. They really liked when the jar was pulled away just as the fire is going out only to magically re-light!

The next big event for the school is our annual Halloween party! Should be lots of fun!

Ending the month will be a visit from the Champaign County Forest Preserve doing an enrichment activity on "Trees". All of our classes will participate in this enrichment presentation.

Shaving cream!

Gotta love shaving cream in a preschool classroom! So many wonderful things to do with shaving cream! You can use the shaving cream as mortar between unit blocks, put it in your sensory table, fingerpaint with it, mix it with glue and paint for puffy paint pictures, and my very favorite (thanks to the "Ooey Gooey Lady" for this great science idea) is shaving cream on water in a clear container and take eye droppers of liquid watercolor and drop the liquid watercolor in the shaving cream. Fun for the children doing the dropping and fun for the children watching the liquid watercolor break through the cream into the water. Pretty cool!