Boom Boom!  You've  all read the book Chicka Chicka Boom Boom to you children right?  There are so many activities out there for this book, but I thought I'd make a quick post about a simple one that can stay out for the students and reinforces the idea of capital and lower case letters.

Turn your file cabinet to the wider side so it faces out to the room (yeah, that ugly thing that takes up too much space in your classroom) and use some construction paper to make a tree with the kids. Make it the height of the cabinet so it will be big enough.

Now pull out all those magnetic letters you have laying around with no place to go. Stick the capital letters on the left hand side of the tree and the lower case on the right, like they've fallen off the tree.

Now when your reading the book and you get to the part of the book that sings:
"Skit, scat, scoodle-doot,
Flip, flop, flee.
Everybody running to the coconut tree.
Mamas and papas and uncles and aunts
Hug their little dears
Then dust their pants.
“Help us up,” cried A, B, C.Skit, scat, scoodle-doot,
Flip, flop, flee.
Everybody running to the coconut tree.
Mamas and papas and uncles and aunts
Hug their little dears
Then dust their pants.
“Help us up,” cried A, B, C."

Invite the children to come up and help the mamas and papas and uncles and aunts find their little children who've fallen off the tree. Depending on the class size you may need to let them take turns, but with a small enough class you can work together.

That's it. It's a quick idea that worked out well and I thought I'd share it. I've this tree set up in different ways all the time, sometimes to encourage reading, others letter recognition. It's always up and the kids have the option to meander over to it during any of the morning activities.  Enjoy!

Through this simple activity, they learned about the eating habit of birds, problem solved the issue of "leaving no trace" so that our feeders weren't adding to the litter we've seen, and about the natural cycle of food scarcity in winter months for anyone that doesn't have  a grocery store that ships food into their community. 

The next Service-Learning activity we engaged in involved the concern students had for animals and the litter they would encounter in their environment. I asked the students why it mattered and here are some of the responses that came from our planning conversation:

"They don't know what it is and could get scared if they see it"
"They might think it's food and eat it and it would make them sick"
"It makes their homes dirty, they live in the grass and trees"

On our trip to the Summit we played a good amount, but we had other goals besides reaching the top. We planned to feed the birds and clean up their homes and that's what we did on our climb up. When we saw trash, any  play would halt as one child would announce to the rest "I see garbage!".  They would all rush over, call me to bring the bag and we would pick it up. 

Once they were sure that the litter was safe in my trash bag, play would immediately commence. Often times the trash pickup became part of their space mission and would be incorporated into their play without missing a beat.
"Roger, I see garbage on the moon", "Copy that, let's fly over and pick it up!".  How much more meaningful can play get?

 We always make time to reflect on our service. How did we help? Why did we help? Did we really help? What else can we do?  Sometimes this is done by a lunchtime conversation, other times through acting out scenarios in our pretend play or building with blocks, but we always reflect and connect it to what we've been doing at school. It's all connected and it should be. We don't exist alone and we shouldn't. We are all important parts of this community.  We all belong, we all make a difference in some way,  especially the kids. 

We woke with a goal: The Summit. Being the third time our class has visited Caves Crater this school year, we all felt that it was time to reach the top.

Each of our trips to the trail were designed with different goals in mind. The first time we ventured on the trail, we explored vegetation and tried to spot animals and had a picnic. We almost made it to the top, but tuckered out before the peak. The second time we went we explored the same vegetation and looked for how it had  changed now that fall was upon us. In our exploration we found a good amount of trash and it became an impromptu, student initiated, class litter clean up as I lugged trash up and down the hill.  We were (un)fortunate enough to find a plastic bag that we used to haul our findings out of the forest.

As we prepared for our upcoming adventure, we were in the dead of winter and the students had expressed concern over the lack of food the rabbits, squirrels, and birds might have during these cold, dry months.  Remembering my family used to make pine cone bird feeders when I was a  kids, I pulled out some pine cones I had stored away, so we could use them as a base and not add any trash to the forest.

All morning, we slathered the pine cones in vegetable shortening and rolled them in birdseed. When we arrived we spent the first hour of our hike sloshing through the forest hanging feeders with cotton string, some high, some low (for the rabbits, of course).

All that feeding made us hungry, so we stopped by a tree stump to nibble on our own snack , watching to see if any animals partook in our offerings. 

On our way back up the trail we came across some sticks that turned out to be perfect for making our own snake tracks and for practicing our writing skills.

We continued making tracks as we headed up the trail  until, we found the spaceship we always ride when we visit and proceeded to blast off!

We landed on mars in time to find a spaceship race had just started. We'd been preparing all week, so we were ready to win. As you can see, the race was a serious one.

After our victory, we continued on the path until we came to a crossroads. Our beginning reader helped us learn which direction we needed to go to reach the summit by reading a sign on the trail. After some sounding the words and learning what vehicles weren't allowed up the trail we took off in the right direction.

 At least until we were distracted by "THE BIGGEST SPACESHIP WE'VE EVER SEEN!!!"

It took us to the moon where we practiced zer0-gravity walking and did a little zero-gravity yoga.

Our ship landed back on Earth, we were finally on our way up the crater. The trees started to change from Ponderosa  Pines to smaller conifers. We cautiously approached some Alligator Junipers that were in our path. Luckily, this one didn't bite.

So we decided to have lunch with it.

As we proceeded up the 500 foot elevation increase of the trail we spotted some sticky pine sap coming out of the trees.  We proceeded to smell, taste, and roll the sticky sap around in our fingers while singing the "Icky Sticky Bubblegum" song, substituting "sap sap sap" for "bubblegum"  in the lyrics.

Our uphill assent led us around to the North side of the cinder hill. This side of the hill doesn't get much sun during the winter so we were able to track some animals in the snow. The general consensus was that these tracks came from one of the leashed dogs we'd seen hike up the trail ahead of us. Though, it could have been a baby dragon. 

As we drew closer to the top we were able to get a beautiful view of the San Francisco Peaks. We stopped to rest and stare at it, all the while practicing saying the words "San Francisco" over and over again between bursts of giggles. 

After a little over a mile of uphill climbing we finally reached the crater's top!  Everyone had a sudden burst of excited energy as we tried to find our school amongst the little community below. 

Outside the caves we found hundreds, if not thousands of pottery shards that were left when the ancient dwellers moved on. We left them for other visitors to see, but had fun trying to fit some of the pieces together. 

Our descent led us back down to complete the 2.4 hike. It took us a bit longer because of the diversions we had along the way but I think we learned more because of them. 

What did you learn at school today?

Our Valentine party was a blast this year! I'm not a huge fan of commercial holidays, but I happen to love Valentine's Day. If you get rid of the pressure to buy silly things for people that they don't need and drop the romantic Hollywood "love" bit,  it's possible to make the day just about one important thing we all need more of : LOVE.  Why not have a day to celebrate love and how it exists around us. Sure, we should do that everyday, but I vote for having a day that's devoted to remembering all of the love in our lives. 

Today we focused our activities around some central questions:

How can we teach our students and children to express love?  
How can we make sure our students know they are loved?  


I teach a good amount of sign language here. I'm proficient in American Sign Language and think it to be a complex and beautiful language that everyone would benefit from learning. it also gives students a kinesthetic way to express themselves when they can't get the words to come out! One of the activities I set up was a sign language "I LOVE YOU" hand that I found on Pinterest (with no website link). If anyone knows who originally came up with please add the link!

They each traced their own hand independently, so some of them came out beautifully wonky. I love looking at them hanging on the walls, it warms my heart!

Another of our activities involved some Math Play!  Each student received a small container of conversation hearts that they sorted by color. After sorting them on the graph they took off the hearts (each got to eat one) and colored in the bar graph with the appropriate color.  Each of the students was able to identify how many of each color they had simply by looking at the graph. They were also able to identify Most, Least and Equal!

Some chose to practice their cutting skills, moving away from straight lines and cutting out hearts.  This brought about more Math Play through discussions on symmetry as we cut out half a heart on folded paper to make a full heart with two symmetrical sides. 

Student then tried to copy the words from the conversation candy hearts onto their paper hearts. A few needed hand over hand assistance, but most were able to do it independently. It was a fun Early Literacy lesson.



We have a good amount of large easel paper slathered in paint from the first few weeks of school before they actually started to try to paint pictures and were just all about putting as much paint on the canvas as they could. I took some pinking shears and cut hearts out of a few of those paintings and had them out while the kids went between activities. I sat there and waited as they came up to be one by one and we talked about who loved them and who they loved back. We decided to express some of those emotions on the backs of the hearts I had cut out as as they dictated their notes. We stuck all of our Valentine's to a string and hung them at the door for the families to read when they arrived for pick up. My favorite was one that a student wrote to his dog, Pumpkin:
     Pumpkin,
    I think you talk.
    I'll give you a treat when I get home.
    Love,
    W.

Of course, it wouldn't be a real post if I didn't talk about food, now would it? What says love more than cooking together? We spent the rest of the morning baking gingerbread (by student request) and the afternoon decorating and eating them. We made an improvised gluten-free gingerbread recipe:

3-1/2 cups Pamela's Gluten-Free Bread Mix 
2 TBS ground cinnamon 
1 tsp baking powder 
2 TBS ground ginger 
1/3 cup unsalted butter or margarine
1/2 cup  brown sugar
1 egg
1 to 2 tbsp water

Now, this is real preschool art, not art Martha Stewart made to be picture perfect for everyone on Pinterst. This is Preschool Food Art made withLOVE :)  Spreading the frosting gave them some fine motor skill development, as did the decorating. I was impressed that they remembered where the heart was in the body (from our trip to the vet) and as you can clearly see, the alien gingie with hearts for eyes: he's in love.  

Overall, it was a joyful day filled with learning and play and play and learning and more play. I hope that each of them went home and told someone they love them. That would make it perfect. 

One of the things I learned as a kid was not to play with my food. I never listened and always got a good talking to for it.

The good talking to would be miraculously erased from  my brain the moment my eyes lifted from looking at my shoes and saw the palette of colors on my plate.

Kids seem to have a natural need to play with their food.  I often watch in amazement during  lunch as  dramatic scenarios between a carrot , a potato chip, and a lonely water bottle that are fit for prime time unfold before me.

After years of working with children, many of them as a behavior specialist, I have learned (sometimes the hard way) that if their instincts tell them to do something, they are going to find a way to do it, so you may as well help them do it right. Though there are other reasons to encourage food play at school.

Incorporating snack time into the learning day gives me another way to present the lesson.  Snack isn't something that is prepared by me or another adult, it's often another learning station they can choose from.   Sometimes I include visual recipes, like we did in Banana Ghosts,  other times supplies are put out and their creativity goes wild like we did in the first installment of How to Play with Your Food.   I often make surprise play food for them to go along with a Theme like I did in Monster Toes or I incorporate our snack into whole day's  lesson as we did when we ground corn we grew here into flour and made Blue Corn Mush as a snack.

Today our snack table had containers with  sunflower seed butter (like peanut butter),rice cakes, raisins, blackberries, and shredded coconut. We've been short on snow this year, so I think some of them have been missing that part of the winter. J. made a snowperson by lathering the rice cake with sun butter, sprinkling on some coconut, and using raisins as the eyes and nose. He got some fine motor work in by spreading the sun butter with a knife and placing the raisins and had a pretty tasty snack to boot.

How do you play with your food?

For the first few weeks they each took about one or two turns at the easel, lathering as much paint as the paper could handle, but after that was over the easel just sat there going unused for weeks. The plain white paper seemed lonely and the whiteness screamed to be set free of its blank and pointless existance. The kids had no interest and despite my encouragement, seemed bored with the idea of painting. It  seemed as if they felt they'd reached their creative peak and didn't know where to go from there. 

I was disheartened too, but not about their art. Art is more about process than product and to be honest, I think their product was beautiful.  I was disappointed that I couldn't figure out how to engage them in using the easel creatively. I wanted them to want to paint more and to be proud of what they painted. I needed something that would get their creative juices flowing.  Besides, I had to do something with all that easel paper I bought at IKEA, right?  

That was when I found the idea for art dice from Tinkerlab and got inspired to transfer it to the easel to see what would happen. I had a Discovery Toys "Crazy Cubes" that I purchased at a garage sale that allowed me to change pictures through the plastic sides.  I drew some simple line designs so the pictures would fit in the plastic slots and also made some extra ones so they could change them whenever they wanted. The die only has four slots so I when it lands on "Crazy Cube" they just giggle and yell "CrazyCubeCrazyCubeCrazyCube!!!" which adds a touch of much needed silliness to the game.  I'm sure I could add some plastic, but I think I like watching them yell "CrazyCubeCrazyCubeCrazyCube!!!" too much.

Within a week they were all at the easel playing the Crazy Cubes game. Sometimes they took turns rolling the die and painting the same picture together, other times they did it alone.  Just two weeks after introducing the Cube their painting has gone from this:

To this:

To this:

This last painting is the students' attempt to paint the horse, Seabiscuit, from the book,  Seabiscuit the Wonder Horse, a picture book we read in preparation for our trip to the Northstar Youth Ranch.

What excites me is that it's clear that the students used many of the shapes from the die in their paintings, even though the die wasn't out for this picture. Prior to us practicing with the die, they refused to attempt to paint anything specific. Now we look for shapes we know in pictures and that seems to give them a base to go off of.

I plan to add more shapes and eventually pictures for them to try their hand at.  The creative possibilities are endless!

I want to take this chance to explain the practice of open-ended lesson planning. The majority of what we do here is open-ended, not everything, but a good majority of what we plan has the potential to lead to something else. Often times that something else is more relevant, experiential, and FUN than anything I could have thought of on my own. Open-ended planning lets me create an outline and then work collaboratively with the students to create the finished project. It keeps me on my toes and forces me to let go of my A-type personality traits a little bit (okay A LOT).  I've always taught like this, so I have  decent amount of practice and and even more tricks up my sleeve that help me manage, but I really think any passionate teacher could do it. Here's the story of how one open-ended lesson turned out.

This Theme we are learning about animals and their connection to our community. How do they live? How do they help us? Why are they integral to our lives?  How can we help them?  These are all questions we will be asking ourselves and each other as we explore this Theme. 

Last week I had a play-doh area with small toy animals set out  where we had been making animal tracks. One student would cover their eyes, another would lay tracks in the play-doh and they would have to guess which animal made the tracks. This was a fun game and everyone stayed at this center for a good part of the morning. At least until one of the students wandered over to the book basket.
 
I always have a basket of books related to our Theme set out and it's available for them to look through at most parts of the day.  In the midst of the animal track game one of my friends asked for me to read  The Mixed-Up Chameleon by Eric Carle. This classic book has been used over and over again in the education realm in a multitude of creative ways. As I read it more students milled over and it spurned a discussion on predators and their prey and the ever popular concept of camouflage and how it's used by animals in their environment both to obtain food and hide from becoming food.

That's when the play-doh area came to life though a game of Predator/Prey. Some of the children were small fish made out of blue play-doh, others were big fish made of yellow play-doh.  The big fish "hunted" the little fish based on the "rules" we collaboratively came up with after learning about camouflage. The big fish could only see the little fish in two cases:

 1) It was hiding by something that was a totally different color and not using its camouflage to protect itself. 
2) It moved. 

If I were not such a stickler about lunch happening by 12:30 I have no doubt that everyone would have done this activity until they were picked up at 4. I eventually interrupted everyone for lunch, but the game remained he hot topic at the lunch table.

In the afternoon we spent a good amount of our time  in our outdoor classroom. They extended the earlier lesson and started the predator/prey game, but this time they role-played with each other until one came to me with a dilemma.  

"Ms. Stephani we have  a problem"
"Oh no! What!?"
"I can't hide anywhere because the other kids can still see my face, it's not camouflaged."

Now this was where I had to be on my toes. I could have said "Pretend it is" or "Awwww, that's too bad". Now neither of these would have been poor responses, but they wouldn't have extended the science lesson from earlier.  So I did what anyone with a nice pallet of Snoozaroo professional face paint would do: I painted all of their faces to match their shirts and  in return, they painted mine a lovely shade of bright orange to match my sweater (the pictures of which were somehow mysteriously deleted).

I had to use the camera on my phone, so I didn't get the best pictures or very many, but I think you get the point. We spent the rest of the afternoon in a live-action game of Predator and Prey. A game they created. I have never seen young children sit so still or so quietly while moving only their eyes( just like the chameleon in the book). I should also mention that the live-action game included one extra rule:

3) You could be seen if you made a noise.

The Point

In my experience, open-ended lessons have always led to better learning. The students have not forgotten what they learned in this lesson. In fact, they have asked me to repeat it every day I've seen them. They now notice animals and insects trying to blend into their environment everywhere . This is an important educational assessment because it means that they can generalize what they have learned to real life situations, and that's really the point, isn't it? 
"Look! Worms are brown like the dirt to hide from birds!!!"  Why yes, they are.
"That bird is brown like the ground, I could hardly see it till it moved!"
"The alligator in the book is green like the slimy water it's swimming in!" Gross. 

What more could I have asked to come out of this day?  Nothing.  Did I get all of the other activities I had planned and ready completed?  No.  I put them away and brought them out the next morning. It wouldn't have mattered if I hadn't done that anyway because they learned more from this than they would have from anything else I had planned. Why? Because they were invested in it.  We can only truly learn when we take control of our own learning whether we are 3 or 33, it's just the way we are wired. That's why open-ended lesson planning is so important. 

 I've found that the  first  and most crucial step to successful cooking with young children is  to assign them each roles. I sometimes use the traditional craft stick (random) method to pick students for the cooking roles.  Each time their name is called they can accept or give that role to a friend that wants it. 

 Another useful option is to use this as an opportunity to differentiate instruction in a multi-age and multi-level classroom.  For example: the student who is starting to read more independently reads out the recipe, the one with an affinity for math can measure .The student who is just learning to follow directions or who is working on fine motor can be in charge of stirring the batter or pouring from one container to another. Students can also be paired with one another in order in a way that will support joint learning. Being a teacher is about finding ways to educate in any circumstance and recognize that life is learning. 

 Once we had our roles and the recipe was prepared we continued the lesson and added the colors of the rainbow!  I try to make it a habit to avoid any sort of artificial coloring in any of the food we eat here. but I made an exception with this cornbread after I was given approval by all of the families involved.