FLOAM!

….was the excitement of the morning! Floam is micro-beaded modeling clay made with Styrofoam and glue! Like Play-Doh, friends were able to sculpt many interesting objects. One friend began rolling balls with his Floam. This caught on and soon we were knee-deep in a math lesson, counting ball shapes and measuring their sizes in terms of small/medium/large. We remembered Paulina’s Spanish translations of these words and explored more vocabulary by asking “are there other words that also describe large?” Three answers prevailed “huge, big and daddy”. When we asked the same question for ‘small’, friends answered “little and baby.”

To extend our math exploration, we moved to housekeeping and played “The Ants Go Marching”. As we marched, we held up the number of fingers we were singing about.

In the truck room, friends were naturally executing a math concept: sorting. Two friends sorted the same number of like animals (and color) and explained “they are having a meeting in the jungle.”

A WF safety rule is that only two friends may be inside the jungle gym at a time. At one point today, another math moment was begging to be explored: five small friends were squeezed into the jungle gym! We stopped what we were doing and with our fingers counted how many friends were in the jungle gym. We asked how many friends are supposed to be in the jungle gym, and we made the adjustment.

Outside this morning, we brought Going on a Bear Hunt and boxes filled with different colored chalk. Friends divided into groups of two and drew all the places talked about in the book (river, snow, mud etc.) Afterwards, a couple older friends decided to actually draw the bear. It started raining so we weren’t able to act out the story—we’ll try again tomorrow!

 

For lunch we served whole wheat tortillas with cheese and refried beans, watermelon and avocado/banana/raisin salad.

Hope you’re having a peaceful day.