the Theme of Earth Day

It is important to teach our children being friendly with the Earth, the one and the only planet where we live and thrive.This week our focus was to teach basic life styles that help clean the air, preserve the resources and benefit the communities.

Things we can do to help earth

Teaching Materials

Group Coloring

painting an Earth

Painting an Earth

our Earth project

Harvest from Backyard Vegetable Garden

Harvesting Cabbage

About five weeks ago, I planted three tiny cabbages in our backyard, now they were ready to be harvested. We pulled them up together with our children this Wednesday. We also picked some sugar peas and scallions from our backyard.

Cabbage, sugar peas and scallions

washed

dinner - buckwheat noodles with Chicken, Carrots and Cabbage

dinner--fired rice with ground beef , cabbage and scallions

We cooked sugar peas and each child ate one, it tasted very sweet and tender. We made dinners with the cabbages we harvested from backyard and Kids enjoyed them. This was a whole organic experience for all of us.

Picnic in the park

 We had a picnic lunch in the neighborhood park this Thursday. Some parents came to join us and we together had a lot of fun.

making giant bubble

play tent

picnic

crafts we made before March

There are some crafts our children made before this March (before I started this blog)

Christmas Tree

Clock

Smiling Sun

All together

Popcorn Blossom Tree

vegetables in our backyard

The warm weather and the frequent rain of this Spring made our vegetables grow fast. Our children like to observe them, talk about them and water them when they play in the backyard. We take this as a good opportunity to connect them with nature and teach them to be responsible for the environment.

watering the vegetables

sweet pea pods in our backyard

teaching idea: large magnetic board

I bought this large magnetic board when I just started our childcare in last October. It had been stored in  closet for several months until I found ideas to make use of it. Now we can not do without it.

Example one: Story Making
We created a story (in Chinese) with our children last week on the board. It was about a caterpillar wanted to join a birthday party with two butterflies, unfortunately, they did not reorganize it as their friend because it looked so different. Our children moved around the small magnetic objects on the board and helped me add dialogue to make it a  happy ending story. The caterpillar finally got accepted by the butterflies and had great fun with all the friends in the party. They ate and played. Finally the clock told them it was time to go home....

Creating our own stories on the board

Example two: Dress Up Game
We have played this game again and again. Our children seemed never get tired of it.

Dress up the dolls on the board

Example three: Chinese Geometry Puzzle (七巧板)
This is a Chinese traditional toy for children: simple and smart. A fun way to teach shapes and geometry. Now they can be made with magnetic.The whole set came with only seven pieces of colorful shapes, but they can be used to create objects from human, animals, boats, airplanes to trees, flowers, books, candles. The possibility is literally endless.... Our children love this puzzle very much. This puzzle will grow with children, as they grow bigger, they can learn to create more advanced shapes.

Chinese Geometry Puzzle

a simple tart

I found a box of vanilla Jello in my pantry so we make 6 simple tarts together this Friday. We let our children dissolve the Jello into milk and pour the mixture into the mini pie crust and observe the runny mixture become soft set in about five minutes. The last step of course was their favorite : tasting the tart. I had one myself, I would not say the flavor was supreme, but kids love to do new things, it was a fun activity for a rainy day after all.

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math: using balance

I bought this plastic balance at Amazon. It is bigger than I expected. I am happy with that. It is supposed to be sensitive to 1 gram.

We used it this week to teach weight and math.We demonstrated to our children how to achieve balance by adding their favorite jelly beans on each side. Then we allowed them to eat one jelly bean at a time and observe how the balance being changed.
 

plastic balance

Arts and Crafts: Baby Chicks

We made Baby Chicks this Friday. This is a easy project, good for young children, and they are super cute.

Hot Cross Bun

We baked hot cross bun with our children on Wednesday.  We used a easy recipe from internet. and it turned out to be very successful. Our children really enjoyed making and eating the buns and we gave them chance to bring some home to share with parents.

dissolving active yeast in warm sugar water

add flour, egg, butter, sugar to form the dough

punch down doubled dough and let it rest

shape the dough into 12 small buns

sugar glaze brushed on

final product

Baking is always a science to me. I remember my Chemistry teacher in high school who was very good at cooking and gardening. He taught us all the principles and theories in books could be employed to those chores. He is one of the most interesting people I've ever met in my life.

How Seeds Travel and grow

This week we learned about how seeds travel and grow.
Early this week, we had a chance to blow dandelions  (蒲公英) in the park, a wonderful first hand experience for our children to learn how wind help seeds travel.
Later we read a book together called the Tiny Seed by Eric Carle, a classic children book about seeds and season. I  also found a video clip  of this book on youtube narrated in English.
Our children were very fascinated about the destiny of the tiny seed and they loved to know the happy ending: the tiny seed grew into a giant flower.

We planted some basil and parsley seeds a couple of weeks ago, now we have beautiful buds in these small pots. A couple of weeks later, we will transfer them into a bigger pot and build a mini herb garden together.

basil and parsley

the Theme of Easter

This week our theme is Easter.

We colored 2 dozen of Easter eggs together. First our children used the small metal wand to coat a even layer of color on each egg shell. Then came the most difficult part of this job: using the wand to transfer the colored eggs to the newspaper covered plate for drying. Overall, our children did pretty well, only one or two of the eggs were broken during the process. (Do not worry, they were all hard boiled)

It took a little longer than we planed to finish the project, but our children enjoyed it very much and patiently waited for their turn to color eggs.

color Easter Egg 

 color Easter Egg

colored Easter eggs

Easter Egg Hunt Party on Friday

This was our first outdoor family party.  Our children had so much fun, so did all the parents.

Easter Egg Hunt

Easter Egg Hunt

I bought too many plastic Easter eggs so I had to think about some ideas to make use of them.
This blue birds craft we made this week at least helped reduce some inventory. :)

Blue Birds