Paper jelly fish or Thanksgiving turkey!

    This activity is very easy, clean and very exciting!
The following activity created according to sensory learning infants but may be also used for ages from 6 months to 6-7 years.
    For infants we used a styrol foam ball covered with masking tape upside down; so it become sticky and stripes of tissue paper easily attach to the ball. Finally, child gets a jelly fish.... or a little colourful monster, if you help your child place on the ball goggly eyes!

    Activity created for infants but now my older children enjoyed it a lot to make a gift for Thanksgiving day.
We used sterol foam cups for the body and sterol foam ball for the head. Instead of feathers we used dried maple leaves and yellow paper for the beak. The other part activity belongs to my lovely colleagues.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING EVERYONE!

Common activity (art)

This is very common activity, which many teachers use in their curriculum.

Activity is easy to execute, clean and children enjoyed it a lot. As a result, parent may have a wonderful picture which they can frame and put on the wall. Just look on the pictures and if you will have any questions feel free to ask me in comments.

Compare real pictures

I just was reviewing my "Spring project" and reminded that we had very interesting activity.

We could see our playground through our window; so once children realised that the view from our window changes every day. I brought my camera and we took pictures every day during the week. I developed pictures on weekend and on Monday we could compare pictures and notice the changes.

Sweet and sour

During last week my children were exploring kitchen staff. We could not believe how those little people were interested to discover any kitchen staff such as pots,  pans and lids, spoons, bags, also artificial and real food! Activity "Sweet and sour" had a purpose to introduce our children different tastes.

Texture, sensory and art

This activity combined a few purposes:
- art - painting with ketchup - infants have no idea about differences between paint and ketchup or jam, is it? They usually taste everything that they have in their hands. We sometimes are very sorry about eating a lot of pain by our children. Once or twice they tried no so tasty "paint" they will remember that they shouldn't eat the paint.
- sensory - by smashing ketchup with the salt infants can explore different kinds of tactility.

- taste - infants certainly will try this mix (ketchup and salt). My children did not like that taste!(I put a lot of salt). We tried it a few times and now no one of my older infants do not put any kind of paint in their mouths!

Some ideas about cold and hot

Babies around one 15-16 months usually are not speaking; but they may say some words and actually they understand everything. I try to communicate with babies as adult people and usually they response in the same way. This is activity for babies but I think younger preschoolers will enjoy this activity also.

There are three bottles: two with colored water - red and blue. and plain water. The bottle with red water is warm, the bottle with blue water - friezed, and plain water is in regular temperature. Try to explain children a concept of hot and cold; sure they will response in proper way!

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.