Jumping Jelly Beans!

Today we painted with jumping wind up Jelly Beans and Easter Eggs. The children focused on fine motor skills, taking turns, mixing colors, color identification and vocabulary expansion. They had so much fun watching the Jelly Beans jump across the paper! They were able to explore what happened when the Jelly Beans jumped through thin paint and thick paint. The students made circle prints with plastic eggs and used fine paint brushes to paint with the remaining paint. Enjoy watching the video!

The 411: The Amazing Milk Magic Trick

Hit the link below to go to the blog to see how to do this science experiment and to see all of the pictures.

The 411: The Amazing Milk Magic Trick: "Today we did a really cool milk experiment. We video taped it so you could do it at home with your child. It is simple and so mu..."

Adding Art into the Curriculum

I wanted to share one of the ways we are trying to work the arts into our curriculum.  We are concentrating on the letter "A" and the sound it makes.  So we thought we would pick an artist whose name started with the letter "A".  Who better than Ansel Adams?  We showed the children some pictures of Ansel Adams work.  Here are a few of his pictures.

After showing the students the pictures of Ansel Adam's work, we then took them outside with a digital camera and let them look for what they thought would make good subjects for their pictures.  They were then given the digital camera and were told to snap away.  These are some of the pictures they took.  I did use PhotoShop to increase the contrast, crop and make the pictures black and white, but the pictures were taken by the children.  I encourage you to give your student's the camera and see the world through their perspective.  Don't forget that the camera is a powerful form of artistic expression.  I included one or two color pictures they took for the before and after effect.