Snow days are special days here at First Discoveries. We take full advantage of the days when school is canceled because it doesn't happen a whole lot. It's such a magical thing when children wake up in the morning and realize that they don't have school that day so we try to make it a magical day here as well, even though they are still attending preschool. We even had a special guest, David, come to visit for the day. Anna was very happy to show her big brother around her school and introduce him to all of her friends. He told me that he enjoyed himself and wanted to stay longer so that's a great compliment coming from a "big kid" like David.
This morning we watched the movie "The Little Mermaid". 25 below 0 weather calls for a Disney movie!
After our movie we had lunch of vegetable and cheese quesadilla's, salad with ranch dressing, apple slices and milk. As the children finished their lunch they worked on a few different projects. One was coloring a circle worksheet for Spanish class, one was stringing cheerios onto yarn to put in the tree for the birds, and one was our Great Artist project.
The Great Artist of the week is Hans Arp (1887-1966). Hans Arp was a sculptor, graphic artist, painter, and writer who lived mostly in Zurich, Switzerland. Hans Arp believed in the artistic law of chance. He invented a new type of collage technique where he tore paper into different sized pieces and then dropped them through the air from above and watched them land on a large sheet where they formed a natural design of chance. Hans Arp never knew where the pieces would land, but he loved the surprise of watching what happened and gluing them in place as a collage.
We enjoyed this activity by having one child stand on the learning tower with a basket of different sizes of paper. The child on the learning tower dropped the pieces one at a time onto a large piece of paper on the floor. Once they fell onto the paper another child worked to glue the pieces right in the place they landed. The children really enjoyed this activity and spent quite some time working on their papers and watching the little pieces of paper fall in crazy ways.
After spending some time on our projects we had a treat of hot cocoa! We really never serve flavored milk, and hardly ever have any treats before nap time but this was a special cold weather day!
At group time we read a couple of silly stories and did some math activities. We practiced doing color patterns- which the children are absolute pros at! I tried to trick them a few times but they were really good! We worked on adding and subtracting the colored cubes and they were incredibly good at that too! When they can visually manipulate objects to add or subtract they catch on immediately and can do very high numbers.