winter ice ornamnets

With the below freezing wind chills, I thought it was a good time to try making ice ornaments. We reused disposable cereal cups as the mold for our ornaments and filled them with items from our ‘Beautiful Stuff’ collage collection.

After we filled the cups the children used watercolor paint and droppers to add color to their ornaments. Initially we only had a small amount of cups so each child could only make one (normally we have enough for each child to create until they are ‘done’. I practically had to swear on the life of my firstborn that we would make more on Monday.   

The results add a nice splash of color to our white winter wonderland!

scooters and bean bags

This great gross motor activity came from a very nice lady, Dr. Divya Sood, of our university’s occupational therapy department This is an activity she recommended for children who could benefit from vestibular stimulation. I'm not going to lie, I just Googled vestibular system.

What I did was have the children lay on their stomachs on scooters. The object was to scoot around, pick up bean bags and scoot them to a bucket. As the bean bags came in, I threw them back out on the floor. At first I threw them at random, but then I placed them strategically so that they had to scoot farther distances to acquire them.  

The children had a blast.

we used cheese graters (and no one got hurt!)

I learned about this activity from Lisa Murphy’s Ooey Gooey workshop. She has great resource books for parents and teachers alike, and I highly recommend them. We used the graters to shred Ivory soap. Lisa recommends Ivory because it’s softer and easier to shred.

Before I let the children use the graters, I demonstrated how to use them properly at the morning meeting. I showed the children how to hold them, and explained that they had to keep their fingers as far away from the metal as possible or it would cut them. The first child up to the table was a 3.3 year old. My assistant and I held our breath as he began, but we had nothing to worry about. All the children used the graters properly and no one got hurt. They were very eager to have their turns though, that’s for sure.

Here are some of their words:

M: This is softer than a blanket.
K: These are shavings.
A: This is hard snow. The flour is soft snow.
K: It looks like salt and pepper.