Sweet Garden

Thanks my friends!

Many of those activities below done by my friends, students of Centennial College in Toronto. Last semester we contributed them to the blog of our course "Curriculum development". Soon we will graduate and will not use this blog any more. I decided to save some activities in my blog, then anyone who read it may use it to work with children.

My greatest book

"One of the activities I was proud of implementing at my daycare was the activity of building children’s self- esteem. Preschool to Kindergarten is the stage where they begin to build self-esteem. I noticed the children at my placement were starting to compare themselves with each other and would say, “I cut better than Child E”, or “She doesn’t know how to play tag”. After that, I thought of making a book with the picture of each child in my daycare and on the bottom, it said something like, “I am Child E, I like doing my craft. I also like using chopstick”. After I read this book during the circle time, left it around the book area. That afternoon during their free play, I heard one child reading the book to the other three children imitating what I said and describing the picture saying, “I am Child E I like doing craft and I like color red”. The teachers in my room were really impressed with the book and said I did a great job. "
By Maryelle

Yucky germ

Hello everyone!

This semester I did a few activities about germs. To get children attention I used some monsters toys. Next time I was talking about where germs are living and I got an idea to make germ from "smelly" socks! So, I bought two pairs socks for dollar, add a few beads, glitter circles, some stickers, one yarn and two googly eyes. Looks like children wanted to do the same and we just draw on the socks with markers faces! they enjoyed play with puppes. But before a lunch time they all went to wash their hands, without any remining!!!!

Meet my "smelly" sock, a yucky germ!

PS. wonderful book "Germs" by Judy Oetting is very helpful!

Play Dough

The recepie is almost the same. Usually, teachers make play-dough by themselves, try to avoid mess in the class-room; but this is great opportunity for children to feel themselves self-confident, creative and responsible.

This is a recepie: There is the process

P.S. This dough called in Russia "Salted dough" or "Russian porcelaine" and many artists use it to create wonderful souvenirs.

A few years ago, before I came to Canada, I and my children with their friend gathered together to create ormanents for Christmas Tree. We dried it, painted with paint and decorated with glitter. There is a secret for modeling you have to exchange woter for potato starch glue( 1+1/2 tea spoon potato starch mix well with 1 cup boiled water and boil it for 1 min. Cool down)

Here they are And here some which we made for Christmas 4 years ago with Canadian children 4 and 6 years old

Celebration of Spring

This week finished my project "Spring Sprouts", so we celebrated Spring with my children.I hope spring came to everyone in the WORLD!

Project includes over 20 activities such as painting pots, planting seeds, measuring sprouts, discovering part of tree, making noise makers to call spring, making different types of collages with seeds, vegetable printing, and many others. The top point was making a blossom tree, you can see it on the middle.

Spring garden

During my curriculum "Spring Sprouts" we planted with children many different kinds of plants.We find out that some plants grow up fast, some - very slowly.But the Garlic was the tallest. One child asked me if we can taste our plans. That is how emerged our Herb's activity! Believe, we had a lot of fun by tasting and smelling them!