Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Joy School!

Today we had a lesson on Weather/rain/rainbows/seasons. We turned the living room into a sky-city with blue blankets for the sky, and white pillows for clouds, and a yellow blanket for the sun. I gave them all little rain-noise makers so they could make rain and pretend to be water up in the sky. We took turns wrapping one of the kids in the yellow blanket with a flashlight to be the sun, and then had others take turns being the earth and learned about seasons (facing the sun = summer, side to the sun = fall/spring, back to the sun = winter... as they orbited around). We boiled water to make steam clouds and learned about the water cycle. Made jello out of the boiling water, put it in the freezer to see what happens to liquid when you cool it. The practiced their colors while making rainbows. We mixed playdough colors together and talked about how the light outside is kind of like a bunch of colors all mixed together like the playdough - that if you can un-mix the colors with a prism/raindrop, you get a rainbow! We read a little book about rainbows. We also had a cloud craft - blue paper with cotton balls making cloud animals with the cotton - like when you look into the sky and see the different shapes the clouds make. We had fun! The house is trashed!!!!