This week, we continued to explore the two areas of the school wide curricular intent: paint and social emotional learning. Early in the week, we tried two new ways to encounter paint. We began Monday morning by using sponge stamps in trays of paint. The children enjoyed selecting a different shape to stamp onto the paper. Friends were also intrigued by the texture of the sponges and would experiment with painting their hands with the sponges and then painting the paper with their hands. Also, on Monday, we painted on a new material, tinfoil! The children were fascinated by the reflective nature of the foil which allowed the paint-glue to look shiny. Many of the students realized that due to the smooth surface of the foil, their brushes could glide along and create interesting swirls. We also tried out a new form of dot paint. These squeeze bottles had liquid paint inside. The children were able to mark the paper with dots or squeeze out the bottles to pour out a bit more paint. The children who squeezed out more paint then used paintbrushes to move the liquid paint around the paper.
Finally, later in the week, the children explored paint together with natural materials. We used cut-up apples from our apple picking trip as paint stamps. The children were amused by the fact that we were using apples as a tool for paint. We also had the opportunity to paint our cut-up pumpkin, both inside and out. The children were also delighted to discover that once the paint had dried, they were able to peel it off the pumpkin and the original pumpkin was still orange underneath.
We will continue to explore paint in new and interesting ways throughout the year. As they do so, we will be observing how they encounter the paint and the choices they make as they explore. We are noticing patterns emerge in how they interact with paint depending on time of day, tools available, and uniqueness of opportunities presented. We look forward to sharing our observations with all of you soon.
We also continued our social emotional work, focusing on feelings and emotions. Over the week, we read books (The Feeling Book, Llama Llama Time to Share, Feeling Happy) and sang a number of sang a number of songs (If You’re Happy and You Know It, Feelings Hokey Pokey, Halloween Feelings Song) about feelings. We continued to take pictures of the children expressing different emotions on their face. Today, we revisited an activity we did last week, “Today I feel” where each child had the opportunity to share how they are feeling and color their emotions. We will continue to revisit the notion of how we feel as an individual and we will continue to work on noticing how our friends feel.
