So shapes are awesome, they are something amazing! Well, we found out that shapes can be even more amazing when they are 3 Dimensional! Whenever we go into a unit, or bring up a new subject within a unit, we use our mystery bag (or box, depending on the size). So when I sang our Mystery song in the circle and brought out a big box, the group was so eager to find out the mystery in the box. They asked questions and looked for clues to guess what was in the box. When they finally ran out of questions I told them they had been looking at the mystery the whole time. I opened the box to show them it was empty and I remember Ricardo clearly saying, “Is the mystery a square?” and Bernardo said, “It’s not a square, it’s a cube!” –Oh the wonder of having mixed ages is how they can teach each other!
Yes, it was in fact a cube! What is a 3 Dimensional shape?
From this rhyme we played “I spy”. It’s a game where one person looks around the room and finds a 3D shape, but this person cannot tell anyone where it is, all he/she can say is: “I spy with my little eye something that is a (cube/cylinder/cone, etc)” and then rest of the group has to try and discover by looking around and asking, “is it the…(if the spy child says “cube” we could ask “is it the blocks?). It lasted about 10 minutes and we had searched for all the 3D shapes we could find. The group was ecstatic, they wanted to go outside and find more and more!
So to get our hands dirty we had 3 theme centers ready.
Theme Center 1: molding clay into 3D shapes by following the simple directions presented in form of sequence cards.
Theme Center 2: Making stick 3D shapes!
Theme Center 3: Making newspaper pyramids! I got to say, this was the most popular center! I wish I could fit in there too!
This was a little peek into a few of the learning experiences we had so much fun with as a group just exploring shapes!
I want to further the experience by letting all you parents know that there will be a free exposition of Wassily Kandinsky’s work here in Sao Paulo opening at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (CCBB) on July 9th and it will be available to the public until September. There will be roughly 150 pieces of his work and if you follow this link there is a little more information! I hope you will go see it!
http://www.plataformamacau.com/life-style/kandinsky-no-brasil-ate-setembro-de-2015
Nice job, well done! 😀