A Balancing Act

The weather has been so amazing, that I can't justify making my students come inside. Instead, I've taken my lessons outside. 

We brought our small classroom scale to the sand park with us. We added sand to both sides, trying to balance the sides. Shells, shovels, and other random items were weighed as well. 

Then, we super sized it!  Using a broom handle, strong string, two 5-gallon  buckets, and a structure on the playground, we made a giant scale. The kids had so much fun balancing the aides, trying to fill one bucket to be heavier. Until, the broom stick snapped! One of my students suggested we try again with pipes. We just might have to try it! 

Happy Mudder's Day!

What a wonderful "Mudder's" Day I had!  As I've posted about before, Z-man's dad's family has a Mother's Day party each year and this year, I was there to participate!

Z-man helped me prepare my gifts to give the other mothers in the family:
We sawed a mailing tube into inch and a half sections. For a three year old, there is pretty much nothing better than getting to use a saw.  Then, he wrapped colored tape around each section cut from the tube.  Several overlapping layers of tape on each.  We did this a little at a time over several days. I added tape around the middle to clean up the look and mod-podged each one completing the colorful bracelets! 

We added hand sanitizer or lotion, wrapped them in tissue paper, and viola!

Z-man noticed that most of the mothers were wearing them later that day!

Mother's Day to my #1 hero, role model, cheerleader, and friend, my own mama and the other mamas who inspire, support, and love on me and my guy. I am most definitely a mama suerte!

Compost Continued

My mom, also my director, told some other early childhood professionals about my students and their compost bin. Immediately two of them pointed out that the moisture in the bin had no way to drain and the bugs would drown after a big rain. Oh no.

I brought this predicament to my students. After explaining the problem and why this was a problem (drowning= dead),  I encouraged my students to make suggestions a it how to solve this problem. Many of them had suggestions: It's okay, we will just get new worms if these die. (After some consideration, we decided this was unfair to the worms.) Poke holes in the plastic so the water can drain out of the bottom. (Great idea, but we borrowed the container so it wasn't ours to destroy.) Dump out the water after it rains. (But what if we aren't here to do it, like in the evening or on a weekend?) Fill it to the top so that there is no space for water to get in. (Water can get in very small holes and fill it like a sponge.) Cover the holes with tape.  (Then no air can get in.) I just sat back and let my students consider and debate different choices.
Then one student suggested we make a lid for our lid.  A lid that had lots of space for air and bugs, but blocked almost all of the holes from the rain so only some moisture could get in.  They debated this.  What could we use to make this lid? How can we hold it on? Will it be successful? My students selected a large bucket and thought about string, glue, tape, or zip ties (a material we use a lot in my class).  They chose zip ties and worked together to assemble it.

After the next big rain, we hurried to check it.  All of our bugs were still alive (and more that we didn't even put in...EWWWW!!!) The soil was damp, but not soaking wet.  The lid was successful!

Today we found little bright green bead-like objects inside our compost.  They look like worm egg cases, but are not the same color as the ones we have found in our worm farm previously.  We can't wait to see what they become!

One, Two, Three!

My baby turned three yesterday. Here are my three fave things about the bday boy:

1.  His love for soccer. I personally do not have a love for the game (or rather didn't have one) but my guy is just totally crazy about it. He wakes up thinking about it, eager to put on his soccer clothes and asks to practice at least once, usually more often, every day. I love how intensely he loves the sport because I love that he loves this way. I hope that he always loves whatever he does his intensely and this passionately. Unless of course it's drugs, and then I take that back. 

2.  His voice. I love it. I love listening to the things he has to say and how he says them. I love when he shares his thoughts with me. I love that he has so much to say and wants to share it with me.  I hope that he always finds his voice and always shares his thoughts with me. (Again, there are some disclaimers to this one, too.)

3.  His sense of humor. I've got one silly guy. In our family, we always say you know you are funny if you make Papa laugh. Papa is just not a laugh-out-loud type of guy. Z-man gets him cracking up almost every day. I love how he knows things are funny (like wearing pants on your head or pretending to be asleep and I'm even gaining an appreciation for potty humor (Toots! Bahaha!). I hope he always sees the humor in life and brings smiles to people's faces. 

These have been the most challenging, most rewarding, and most joyful three years of my life.

 I can't wait to see what's next for us!

Making Compost Stew

In April, my class learns about the environment and we spend a week talking about each of the three Rs, reducing our use, reusing what we've used in new ways, and recycling everything we can.  Today, it seemed fitting to make a special Earth day snack for us, and for our class pets. 

For snack, my kids made chocolate pudding "MUD!", complete with worms. They ate them out of planters I found at the dollar store.  My kids loved pretending that it was real mud!

For snack for our worms,  the kids cut up banana peels, apple and pear cores, and grape fruit and orange rinds. We added water and pulsed them into tiny pieces in the Magic Bullet.

Layer by layer, we added dried leaves and newspaper, dirt, and our food waste to an old hermit crab container to make our Compost Stew. We put our worms in the container, made sure it was a little damp, and set the container outside for the sun to do its magic.  We plan on watching our compost over the next month or so to see what changes take place inside our compost bin.

We also played a fun composting game with the pretend food from our kitchen.  We went through the bin placing items that can be composted in one pile and items that should not be included in another. It was good practice for starting our compost bin and super fun to say that meat would make it STINKY!

The book that inspired this lesson? Compost Stew: An A to Z Recipe for the Earth by Mark McKenna Siddal and Ashley Wolf.   We repeated the sing-song rhyme from this book as mixed our stew: "Put in all in a pot... and let it rot... into COMPOST STEW!"

Happy Earth Day!

Canvases on the Cheap

This summer, I'm running four weeks of full day elementary camp.  For twenty nine hour days for forty campers, there is a lot of preparation to make a fantastic camp. I've already started prepping. 

One of the activities I have planned is painting inspiration canvases with Dr. Seuss quotes. (Camp has a Book Wars theme.)
When I looked up the prices online, it just felt like a waste of camp resources to spent over a hundred dollars on canvases for this one activity. After some Pinteresting, I found this tutorial for making miniature doll house canvases. So I super-sized it!
Using white poster board, diaper boxes, muslin, a hot glue gun, an iron, and Gesso canvas primer, I made 40 canvases in a hour for a whopping total of $22.  I cut the poster board and diaper box to the size I wanted and then hot glued them together.  After stretching muslin around the cut box, I hot glued the fabric tightly to it.  I ironed the front of the makeshift canvas and then painted on the primer.  TADA!

They aren't quite on par with the ones you buy at the store but summer camp quality? Totally. 

Extending More Than Just the Track

As my kids entered the classroom, I gave them this problem: extend the train track that I had started on our table as much as they could. Several kids were interested when the track easily stayed on the table. As it got longer and longer, they had to work harder, trying to balance it on the edge or placing the track carefully on the backs of chairs. Then, one student saw some uncommon building materials in our classroom and used them to support the track. Challenges like this really stretch their cooperation, creativity, and thinking!