My Heart is Like a Zoo

We read this book "My Heart is Like a Zoo" - it is full of pictures of animals made out of hearts.  The kids loved trying to find all the hearts in the pictures.  Then we made our own animals out of hearts.

We had a frog, and butterfly, and some unicorns, and a monster.

Making Valentines

During our Valentines week our writing center turned into a Valentines making station.  I added all things pink, red, and purple.  Plus a lot of hearts, and stickers, and envelopes.

I also added some Valentines words to our word wall.

This was a POPULAR station.  Next year I will probably add an extra table to accomidate all of the attention.  However it is nice to take turns and be able to have a quite space to create with only one or two kids around you.

But regardless it was busy busy all day.

Salt tray

I got out my salt trays for the first time this year - and it made me sad that I hadn't gotten them out sooner.  They loved them and were able to use them very responsibly.  First I decided to color the salt pink.  Then I put out heart cookie cutters and s stick for writing or drawing.  And since this was the first time they had seen the salt trays.  I put some patterns and words in the salt trays.  

They made patterns, pictures, and wrote words.  Salt trays are an excellent pre-writing exercise, especially for reluctant writers who need writing to be introduced and reintroduced with a lot of different mediums and experience.

Water drop hearts

For art time one day I decided to use my direction board to explain the process of making water drop hearts with coffie filters.  I had previously cut coffie filters into the shape of a heart.  Then I had the table set up like this (below), with the direction board like this (above).

The children were able to understand the direction board and follow the steps to make their hearts.  I did not have to give any direct instruction on the process - they are getting so good at problem solving and logic!

We got some beautiful water drop hearts!

Graphing conversation hearts

For the last month or so we have been using our Math Bags to learn about sorting, counting, telly marks, and graphing.  Today we extended what we have been learning with our math bags into our valentines play using conversation hearts. 

Each child got a bowl of conversation hearts.  First we sorted, then we graphed.

Then we went around and each child got to tell us what their graph told them.  Which had the most? The least?  If any had them same number?  Etc.  (I had made sure that each child's bowl had a different number of different colors, so that each child's graph would be different.)

3-D hearts

For one of our large group activities we made some 3-D hearts.  Although I did not call them 3-D hearts - I called them "pop out hearts".  First I modeleld for them how to make them, then we worked on it together.  It was kind of a challenging process at the begining, but after making one or two they all becamse experts and made several.

You take a strip of paper - fold it in half, then start at one side and start rolling it until you get to the fold, then you roll the other side until you get to the fold.  Then you roll them out a little and you have a heart.  Then you can glue them onto a paper.  To keep it a heart shape you should glue them on their side.  That was a hard concept for the kdis to grasp - so most got glued on their bottom, which distorted the heart shape - but the kids didn't seem to notice or mind.  They all thought that they were beautiful hearts... and they were.

oh, first we wrote the word "heart" on our papers.