Pirates

You know what is awesome? In a fictional way, that is? PIRATES! Yes, we had a unit dedicated to those old buccaneers. It was considerably more light-hearted than many of our other units and included a couple of 'just-because' projects.

Torn paper collages. After crafting 3D boats from tin-foil we captured the moment on paper. I make it a point to never 'fix' a child's art. I love that you can see the different methods of thought they all have. Many have some recognizable form of a sail on a mast, but there were a couple of exceptions.

For instance - one might assume this child misunderstood the objective of making a boat and was simply going to town with the ocean. But when I asked him, he explained that it had to look invisible so that his pirates could sneak up on you. Clever.

Or how about this beauty? The ocean is sideways and the ship is upside-down might be the reaction of someone that wants the art to look 'right'. Actually her poor ship had the misfortune to sail over a waterfall... but still in the ocean. ;)

We also made pirate hats and paper bag parrots. We learned to great phonics songs - a song about the letter P and a song about the -ar sound. "A and R for a pirate goes AR, AR, AR!" They each posed in the not-nearly-as-cool-as-the-pyramid pirate ship giving me their saltiest AR!

We also had a program called Junior Achievement come visit, the ladies in our room were phenomenal, but it was a little bit more than the preschoolers were really prepared to work on - worksheets and such just ain't their thing, but the Kindergarteners did great!

Do you have small children? Are fun sensory experiences something you crave? Do you wish water was 20% cooler? The answer. Ummm.... no one can resist these things. They are utterly fascinating, fairly cheap, and technically reusable (I reused mine once, but a large batch takes longer to dry so I just threw them out).

We took some liquid watercolors outside to do some painting on snow before going home. Snow is one of our favorite mediums, plus it is free!

Dot art conversation....
Student: (Thumping away at her paper) Look teacher, I'm making all the people in the world.

Me: Hmmm... that will take a long time. There are an awful lot of people in the world.
Student: (Contemplates paper) Hey, (Friend)! Wanna help me make all the people in the world?

They proceeded to spend the remaining 20 minutes of free time thumping away. I love these moments.

And - just because. Look what Ann found at the store!