Preschool

Gardening Sensory Bin

May 26, 2018 by Stacy Leave a Comment

Everyone learns best by doing so I made a gardening sensory bin for my preschoolers to explore gardening. Obviously, we can garden outdoors but our wet spring was causing problems with that. Our gardening sensory bin was a hit! Like most sensory bins it was messy so if you can take this outdoors that would be ideal. We used it indoors a few days before moving it out to our outdoor play space.

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Gardening Sensory Bin

Create your own gardening sensory bin with a few simple materials. Add whatever else you think may be of interest. We used a tray to put the potted plants on.

Supplies:

Potting Soil
Silk Plants
Gardening Tools
Small pots
Rocks
Vegetable Manipulative Counters
Gardening gloves (optional)
Water (optional)

I bought the small pots and rocks at the Dollar Tree. The flowers are from Michael’s.

There’s nothing like digging in the dirt!

It wasn’t just the girls interested in this bin even though there were flowers involved. Everyone played here.

I recommend small pots which mean less dirt should be spilled if one is dumped!

A variety of items creates interest and options for playing.

Don’t forget the greens! They really liked this fern type plant.

Here’s our flower collection:

Even the school agers were all over this activity after school!

I’d buy those beautiful flowers!

The flowers look real!

As you can see, this is a little messy. Fun though!

I’d call that a success! Happy planting!

Parts of a Bean Plant Diagram Art

May 26, 2018 by Stacy Leave a Comment

We made Parts of a Bean Plant Diagram Art as part of our gardening theme this month. Disclaimer that this is not process art, some may say it’s not developmentally appropriate and it’s too hard for young children. That’s fine but we did it anyway and we did it successfully. The purpose of this project was to learn about the parts of a plant. There’s quite a few! Before starting, we looked at a picture of a plant and pointed out the leaves, stems, roots, flower, fruit or in this case a bean. Read this post about the Value of Both Product and Process Art.

Parts of a Bean Plant Diagram Art

Our Parts of a Bean Plant Diagram Art were a little more of a complex project with preschoolers but I felt it was well received and meaningful to my group. I could have certainly just put out all the materials for everyone to use as they desired but I thought this was a good opportunity to work together as a group and work on listening skills, considering the needs of our friends and developing patience.

I don’t have photos of the process since I was busy helping the process. First of all, I loved the materials provided by Mother Goose Time! The colors and the creativity were appealing to me and as engaged as everyone was, I believe it was for my kids too.

We started with the seed. Everyone put a drop of glue on their paper for the seed. Placed the seed. Then on to the pipe cleaner stem. The yarn roots.

The leaves came next. And the beautiful tissue paper flower! What grows on this plant after the flower? The bean!

I helped some glue on the word labels but for most, I placed them and they glued them on.

The children were quite proud to take home their project because they spent a lot of time on it.

I will say it was a busy time and not the easiest type of project to guide a group of six all at a time but the results were worth it!

I received curriculum from Mother Goose Time for honest and authentic stories resulting from my daily experiences using the curriculum. After using Mother Goose Time for about 10 years, I am pleased to promote quality educational learning experiences through play with Mother Goose Time! #sponsored #MGTblogger

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Creating Seed Mosaics

May 26, 2018 by Stacy Leave a Comment

First, we explored soil, then seeds as part of our gardening theme. One of our seed activities was creating seed mosaics which turned out beautiful! I’ve been enjoying them all month on display in our room. Creating Seed Mosaics allowed the children to explore seeds and handle them to create a design of their own.

Creating Seed Mosaics

Our seed mosaics required basic supplies Mother Goose Time included in the Growing Gardens box. Look at this beautiful inspiration photo that was included. Now, I will admit I had ideas of beautiful well-placed results like this, but in reality, toddlers and preschool results are much different. The idea of a mosaic and inspiration is what’s important. The inspiration photo creates interest, introduces a concept (mosaics in this case) and provides an idea, to begin with.

Toddler and preschool skills vary but we’re not looking for the next Picasso here. What is the purpose of this activity? It’s to explore seeds! That’s exactly what they did. We talked about the different colors an sizes of the seeds. Guessed which seeds produced flowers, grass or popcorn.

The rest is about the creative process and using fine motor skills to squeeze glue and place seeds.

There may be big pools of glue and a few seeds sprinkled.

Older ones are more likely to begin planning their art. We can guide that process a bit so children learn the concept of what we do first, second or third but sometimes I have to be careful with that because too many words, “rules” or steps and children lose interest. This 4-year-old, said, “I’m going to make my name” and he did. That was purely his idea and he was successful. He was satisfied and I thought it was fabulous. Was it anything like the inspiration photo? No, but that’s not the point.

Our youngest, 2 years old, perhaps had the most interesting result but that was because I helped her squeeze the glue. She usually can do it but her bottle was hard to squeeze that day. She held on to the bottle and I helped her squeeze and create a circular design on her paper. Then she sprinkled on seeds. So pretty!

Twine was provided to hang up the seed mosaics. I like the natural look.

All different but beautiful art.

A close up of the texture, shapes, sizes, and colors of seeds.

This is our seed mosaic display in our library area.

I hope you’ve enjoyed our Creating Seed Mosaics activity. Thank you for following along and sharing in our gardening with kids activities!

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Planting Seeds in Preschool

May 26, 2018 by Stacy Leave a Comment

It’s that time of year again to plant some seeds! Planting Seeds in Preschool is such a wonderful hands-on experience for children! I love that it doesn’t have to be a big production to be meaningful. Just a small bean seed or a little container for soil and grass seeds! Both of these offer quick and exciting results.

Planting Seeds in Preschool

My group was so excited to do this little project. Everyone was visibly excited and engaged in this activity from Mother Goose Time – simple planting grass seeds in a small cup. It was over much too quickly so we also planted a larger pot of marigold seeds using seeds I had saved from our flowers last year. Most of the children are able to remember the orange flowers we had in our planter last year so this was a meaningful cycle for them to understand the seeds could be saved and planted again.

I set out two trays and worked with two children at a time to reduce the chaos and the mess! I’m not sure why we didn’t do this outdoors but it may have been rainy since we had many of those days this May…

They were anxious to get started and you could see their little eyes taking in all the supplies and their minds processing what to do first and next, which resulted in their hands quickly.

In an effort to slow down the process so it could be done appropriately and meaningfully, I asked them to identify the items we would be using.

Then other questions like, “What does a seed need to grow?” “What should we do first?”

“Is that enough soil?”

“How many seeds should we plant?”

Some used the spoons and some used their hands. It’s important to offer tools and be flexible. It all works!

This little one was frustrated with the time it was taking to squeeze the pipette and water her seeds so she picked up the jar and poured. Great!

The pipettes for watering slows down the process and prevents the flooding of the seeds plus works on the fine motor skills we need practice with.

We compared the grass seeds and marigold seeds. Marigold flower seeds are colorful like the blooms.

It didn’t take long to see tiny sprouts! It will take longer for the marigolds to grow but that will be fun to watch too. Every day we check to see if they need to be watered.

The grass grew quickly and soon needed to be cut. That’s the fun part!

For some reason, this one didn’t grow as much. He certainly had enough seed in it! Maybe this was the one that got dumped and the seeds ended up all mixed in? That’s part of the learning process in planting seeds in preschool. It’s on going learning through a little seed planted in soil that we can watch and observe for many days and weeks to see what happens.

He helped the younger ones who needed assistance cutting. We hope the grass grows again so we can cut it again!

Such a fun sensory and fine motor experience! Cut grass smells good.

Now we wait for the grass to grow long again.

Soil Collages

May 25, 2018 by Stacy Leave a Comment

Even though we had a late, slow start to spring, we started our Growing Gardens theme May 1st. With so many gray skies and cool, rainy days, it was hard to get into the gardening frame of mind despite gardening being one of my favorite activities. May 1st was actually a beautiful day to be outside which was perfect for making soil collages and digging in the dirt.

Dirt Writing

Each month we start out with writing our names. It was extra fun to practice letters with “dirt writing”. The kids dipped their fingers in brown paint and traced over their letters.

Digging in Dirt

I don’t think there’s a better sensory play activity than digging in the garden! There’s plants, worms, and bugs! Plus it keeps them really busy! They love it. The weeds in our garden are already thriving so we dug some out to feed to the rabbits.