Colour Mixing With Snap Cube Beyblades ELP

The children are constantly using snap cubes to make a version of their favourite toy, "The Beyblade". While Ms. Switzer and I often question their motives for making Beyblades (they like to fight each other with them), we figure that it takes a lot of mathematical problem solving to ensure that they are constructed so that they spin, so we let them go at it.

Today, Ms. Switzer was hanging out with a group of students to see exactly how it all works when something wonderful happened.  She noticed that the children were looking for particular colour combinations. "Let's try red and blue" said one child...Ms. Switzer listened and watched as she spun her Beyblade. "It makes purple!" said another child; Ms. Switzer could not believe her eyes!!! "Come here Ms. Hennessey and see what they are doing!", she said.

Before we knew it, the children were testing their colour mixing theories. They mixed white and black, blue and yellow (which didn't work as well so they tried different combinations of each colour) and red and yellow.  For the most part, it worked! This lead to questions and curiosity about colour mixing. 

I'm sure that this could lead to all kind of fun stuff like paint mixing, coloured water bottles, food colouring mixtures, great books...the possibilities are endless! Only now there's about 5 days left of school. 

It kind of makes me sad, really. Gives us something to think about over the summer.

This is the stuff that makes us remember what play-based learning is all about! 

Planting Vegetables and Using Salad Spinners for Art ELP

Since our last blog post, we have been having fun exploring plants and vegetables.  The children made a plan to show what they wanted to plant: carrots, cucumbers, yellow beans or radishes.

We planted our own plants and watched them grow.  We measured our plants a few times to see how much they grew.

We carefully watched our plants to see if they grew.  We measured to find out if they did using cubes lined up from bottom to top.

We also used salad spinners to create flowers!

We glued the flowers, a stem and leaves on.  Then we drew roots and labeled them with words. We know the parts of a plant!