It was our fourth week of preschool and I introduced our first science experiment and our journals. I was nervous to introduce journals. I didn't exactly know how, or when, or what I wanted our first entry to be. I still hadn't (and maybe still haven't) decided exactly how we are going to use journals in our classroom... I have several ideas... but only experience will help me know what way is best. So I had to get over the fear of messing up and just introduce them. The kids loved them and have asked several times since to do work in their journals.
Back to apples... and science. We wanted to see what would happen when apples were left out. We cut two open, left one plain, put lemon juice on another, cut another into slices, and left a fourth whole. On our first day I hadn't introduced journals yet and hadn't decided too.. so we took our observations on a clipboard.
Then we left them on our science shelf for a week and a half... observing often as we went.
Finally after about a week and a half we got them out, got out journals, and really observed our apples. I wrote down word on our white board that described our apples, some words they come up with were, "brown, small, mushy, soft, wrinkly, fuzzy (we got mold on one of them). We looked at them with magnifying glasses and had some tweezers and knives to observe inside.
Then in our journals we drew pictures and wrote down one describing word. It was a fantastic way to introduce our journals.
On another day we took a poll about "what apple do you like?" We walked around my neighborhood taking our poll. Then we came back to the classroom and did a group bar graph of our answers. The kids were so funny - making the graph was very intimidating to them. Many did not want too... but once we got in the process and I broke the whole process down.. they loved it and came up with a million other things they wanted to graph.
I made an apple sticky table - with contact paper facing up so the apples would stick and could be rearranged. At first I couldn't decide if I wanted this to go on and easel, a wall, or a table. In the end I chose a table because I wanted it to be a collaborative experience, and I wanted a sense of "work being done" that a table provides - I also wanted it to be a quite place they could come sit and work and not feel rushed. This of course has an element of math in it - engineering an apple, patterns, spatial decisions, etc - but this is also great fine motor skills, an element of art and creativity.
In the end all objectives were met!
Sometimes at the end of an activity I can say (like the one above) "all objectives were met" and sometimes... they don't go so well. This was one of those. One day at large group I pulled apples out of a bag and sorted them onto the correctly colored paper. Than we made some patterns. The kids loved this part - participating and learning.
Then when I excused them for center time I told them about our pattern table. They seemed interested during the explanation - but in the end it was a rarely visited center.
On the paper strips are colored circles giving different patterns (aba, abc, abba, aabb), and then the second half of the paper strip is blank for them to finish the pattern correctly. I am puzzled as to why this center was not more popular. I know it can be, I have seen it work with other kids before. I think it had mostly to do with all the other things we had going on (apple store, sensory bin etc)
It had a few kids stop by, but not for long.
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