During one morning meeting last week, Clare brought a bunch of different sized cardboard boxes. She began by asking “can you build by using these boxes?” The children each received a box. One by one the children came up and placed the boxes the way they wanted. Once all of the boxes were stacked, some of the friends wanted to call it a ‘house’ while the others called it a ‘building’ and the rest said it was a ‘castle’. Then Clare and Erika helped tape and glue the boxes together so that the structure would not fall apart.
On Monday, we decided to give our structure a name. The majority of the 3A friends said it would be called the ‘Freedom Tower’. We also decided to paint the building. The children chose four colors: pink, blue, green, and white, and then they painted our ‘Freedom Tower’. They had to stand on chairs to paint the top part of the ‘Freedom Tower’ because it was so tall!
As our final process, the children discussed what other things are needed on the Freedom Tower. We decided that we would need people, doors, and windows. Then the children took different materials to make those additions to our Freedom Tower.
On Thursday, 3A had our first Curriculum Celebration with a yummy breakfast! All of our families came in to celebrate with the children.
We had three activities prepared and they occurred simultaneously, so that everyone would be able to experience all three of them.
The first one was a “Can You Build…” station. The children and the families picked an index card and had to build what the card said! One of the cards had the Freedom Tower. The children were excited to stack cardboard boxes on top of another. We also got help from our daddies to reach the higher part of the building!
The second activity was the Clay-Building station. The children and the families tried to make/build something out of clay. It was the time for our families to get messy with clay! We also prepared wire frames to help make the structures, but all of them were comfortable not using the wire frames. We will revisit how to utilize wire frames with clay next time.
The last activity was the Observational painting station. Earlier in the week, the 3A children voted on what to paint for the curriculum celebration. They wanted to do an observational painting of the Statue of Liberty. Luckily, we had a model of the Statue of Liberty, so we kept it in the middle while the children and the families were painting.
After we rotated through all of the stations, we met back on the rug and shared our favorite parts. Some of the families liked box building, while others liked making clay or painting Lady Liberty. However, every single child agreed that their favorite part of the celebration was to have our wonderful families be in the classroom.
We would like to thank all of the families once again for your enthusiasm, support and love for our children’s learning!
