Sunday, April 6, 2014

April 2014 Newsletter


March was a blast! We are enjoying the start of spring, the warm weather and fun colorful projects and activities. There were a few bugs that got us down last month but we are all healthy and ready to learn and continue to explore and experiment. We look forward to learning more about what Spring has to offer and about the weather and how that helps plants and flowers grow.

Here are a few of our favorite activities from March:

Texture Painting



 
 











For this project I made paintbrushes using popsicle sticks, felt fabric, yarn and that green grass that you can buy around Easter to fill baskets with. The kids experimented with one brush at a time. They had so much fun dipping and using the brushes on paper. Each of the brushes picked up paint and distributed differently on the paper and it was fun to watch them decide how they wanted to use them. I loved how the grass was used for slapping the paper! 





















Cork Boat

We started out this project by wrapping a rubber band around 3 wine corks (that were reinforced by hammering wooden skewer sticks through all of them before the activity).




















We then used our name cards to spell out our name onto the sail.




















We threaded to sail, which we used a hole puncher to make two holes one on the top and the other on the bottom, to a skewer stick (that was then hammered into the middle cork).





















 Sun Catcher





We had to redo this project. The kids absolutely loved it, it was so much fun, we will definitely do this project again. The first time we attempted make the sun catchers we used tempera paint on clear contact paper. We found out that the tempera paint would not adhere to the contact paper. It was really easy to squirt to paint right from the paint bottles and it was really pretty but when they dried the paint flaked right off.





















The second time we made the sun catchers we used sun catcher paint. We used droppers to get the paint on to the contact paper. The kids got to choose the 3 colors they wanted to use. After dripping the paint on to the paper we spun them in a salad spinner and let them dry flat. The contact paper wanted to roll up so we used tape to keep them flat on the table to dry and cardboard in the spinner.