Rainbows & St. Patrick's Day Celebration

*Warning: lots of pictures ahead!*

 

Last week, we were busy little leprechauns, learning all about St. Patrick's Day, shamrocks and rainbows.  I'm going to sum up our Wednesday and Friday classes all in this post, rather than splitting it up into two seperate ones.  Don't freak out!  I know it's out of the norm (really, I don't even know what the norm is anymore), but I promise, it all fits together nicely!  Let's start with our rainbow theme...

 

On Wednesday, we read a rainbow emergent reader and:

 

We graphed Fruit Loops, talked about more and less, and made a rainbow-patterned necklace.

 

The children painted shiny rainbows with the help of a little corn syrup added to the paint.  Check out the ones in the hallway, and tell me you don't just want to touch them to make sure they're not still wet!  We also worked on the order of the colors in the rainbow.



 

We made beautiful torn paper rainbows for our art projects.  They are also in the hallway, brightening it up and anticipating the arrival of Spring!

 

On Friday when we walked in the room, this is what we found:

 a big, leprechaun-made mess!  That pesky little man threw bean bags and blocks all over our room, including in our palm tree!  And you know what else?  He put a pink mustache on one of our babies!  The children were delighted to find the room in such disarray and knew right away that we had been tricked by a wee Irishman!

 

After we cleaned up and settled down (just a little!), we read:

 

In math, we played a roll-a-shamrock game, where the kids rolled a die, then used a dot marker to stamp the same number of dots on the shamrock.  They also had the opportunity to play the shamrock pattern match file folder game again.

 

In art, we colored and cut out a leprechaun, complete with beard.  I didn't get a good picture, but I am very pleased with the improvement in coloring.  All of these fine motor exercises and activities are starting to pay off!

 

At the end of class, we did a Flower Color-Change experiment.  This also involved color mixing (which we did today as well), using food coloring and water.  Currently, we have 3 white carnations in red, orange and yellow water.  (The other 3 are coming soon!)  We will check on them each class day to see which one starts to change first!

 

Hope you all had a fabulous St. Patrick's Day!