NZ Teacher

The children had shown some interest in the lotion I was putting on my hands. I have a lemon lotion and a strawberry lotion. They smelled both of them on their hands and compared the smells, talking about which one they liked the most. The following week we were making lemonade. We began the day with having a lemon on the table and, after the first group of children had arrived, we cut it open. They compared the smell of the lemon to the hand lotion. "It smells like the lemon," they decided.

Some of the children put  blue tape over their mouth.  Usually I would have said something like, "Take the tape off your mouth. It's not for putting on your mouth."  Instead I thought of Tape Man (with some pride, being from New Zealand).  I thought of creativity.  I thought of art.  So we sat together for whole group time, some with tape on their mouth.  I said, "I've got something to show you."  When they first say him one of them said, "It's scary." I reassured them that it's not too scary and that he's being funny. So they started to laugh.  Pretty soon there was no more tape on mouths (not that I minded if there was, it's just hard to laugh).  Thank you Tape Man for reminding us that creativity begins with exploration in play.

Our sensory table has sand in it. There's a water table outside for the children to play with when we're outside. But they love to play with water. The beige tray fitted almost perfectly across the sink creating a water table. Part of the fun of water play is to fill containers with water and pour into other ones. Having the tray over the sink meant the children had instant access to water. The tray needed to be emptied multiple times.

We'd finished adding vinegar to baking soda and watched it froth up over the sides of a tiny glass jar. After we'd finished, the children played with the mixture.  One of the boys found a funnel to help him pour. They were given one rule: pour over a tray.  The rule was only broken a couple of times.

We'd added blue and yellow food coloring to water to make green.  Then the children wanted to do more experiments like that.  One of the boys wanted to make a volcano (or maybe it was a tornado) and he had the idea to tape two bottles together. But it  didn't stick.  Since then some of the children have been winding tape around other objects in the room. Great for fine motor development.

One of the children brought a lemon into school and wanted to make lemonade. The children were asked, "How do we make lemonade?" Some of them showed it on paper. The boy in this picture used a whiteboard to draw how to make lemonade. It's  a picture of a machine used to get the juice out of the lemonade. And that is what we did. We made lemonade.

At the end of the week I saw that our A-Z Recipe Book had been turned to the Owl Cracker page. Instead of proceeding through to the next letter of the alphabet, which would have been 'f' for fruit salad, I told the boy who had been (apparently) talking about this page to his friends, that we'd make the owl cookies the following week. The children were excited to make them and we can make fruit salad some other time.