The Sugar House Field Trip

The sugar house had steam coming out of the top. That is the water being boiled out of the sap. Sap is a whole bunch of water and a little bit of sugar.

We road the horse drawn hay wagon up to the sugar bush.

We needed tools to tap a tree.

First, we measured to make sure the tree was big enough to tap. You need a tree at least 36 inches around. This means if a child hugs the tree, his hands should not be able to touch.

 

We used a hand drill to make our hole--that's the old-fashioned way.

After tapping in the spout with a hammer, we hung the bucket.

Next, we put the "hat" on to keep out rain water because sap already has a lot of water. We heard the sap drops going into the bucket right away.

We went to the buckets in the bush and collected sap into white collection buckets.

Back at the sugar house, we got to look at the big tank that collects the sap from trees with tubes.

Matt made sure to show us the fire under the evaporator. 
They go through a lot of wood.

A Little Irish Luck

We had a St. Patrick's Day celebration today in preschool. My heritage is Irish and this was a holiday growing up that was full of magic and surprises. The kids learned a bit about the lore of Ireland. We read Jamie O'Rourke and the Big Potato, an Irish folktale by Tomie dePaola.

Before they got to school, the Leprechaun visited the classroom. He's tricky, clever, and whimsical. He left a trail of shamrocks throughout the room, so it was easy to tell where he went. There were some places that had a whole mess of shamrock footprints. We're pretty sure that's where he stopped to do a jig.

He used his magic to turn all sorts of things his favorite color--GREEN. It took awhile for the kids to notice them all. The water in the toilet and the water table were green. The glue for our art collages turned green. The collage materials were all green (yesterday they were many colors). The only markers in the classroom were green. The chocolate chop muffins, grapes, and milk at snack all had a green hue. He even turned the teacher's water green.

He also left a bunch of sparkles in the rice table and he hid treasures in there--lucky green coins. He left us a note telling us about all of his antics. Here it is.

We still followed our regular schedule, but all day long we kept finding more treats and treasures. As we collected the treats, candies in green wrappers, we kept counting and re-counting to find out if we had them all. We practiced counting up past 60 many times today. We figured out at the end of play time we still needed to find 5 more pieces. During clean up, we found four of the five.

At music, one of the kids noticed the last piece of candy was hidden on Beth's ear!! How did that leprechaun manage to hide one there? We learned to do a jig. Beth knew the steps from when she was a little kid. There is a lot of jumping and kicking in place and you have to keep your hands by your sides as you move.

At dismissal, everyone got to choose three treats and a treasure to take home as a gift from the leprechaun.

Kids in the Kitchen

I meant to post this before February Break, but things got away from me. As you know, we made granola with Nancy Shaw, our resident foodie here at the community center. She invited us into the kitchen , which is slowly being upgraded, to prepare granola together.

We split the kids into two groups and each of the groups followed the recipe that Nancy had written on the whiteboard. 

We dumped in the oats, wheat germ, barley flakes, nuts, sunflower seeds, cinnamon and salt.

Next, we added in the oil and maple syrup. 


Then we stirred it all together to coat everything. Nancy put it in the oven and cooked it for 30 minutes. We added the cranberry raisins after the mix was done cooking. This keeps the dried fruit from melting in the oven.


Then we ate the granola. The opinion was unanimous. We all either liked it or LOVED it!


I hope you all were able to sample some that went home with each student right before vacation.

Teamwork

At the beginning of the last week of preschool, we brought out the straws and connectors. 

We challenged the kids to work together to build a structure that at least two kids could fit inside. 

The whole idea was to both expand their building problem solving skills, get them to work together, and to figure out how to use their building materials to make a big and strong structure. Here's what we got.

Making Rainsticks

We worked together as a whole team and made a rainstick today. If you are interested (and brave) and would like to make a home made rainstick, here is how you do it. You will need a tube (like a mailing tube or big paper roll innard), nails (the longer the better--as long as they do not go through the tube), hammer, duct tape and masking tape, thinks to make the rain noise such as dried beans, small pasta, rice, lentils, popcorn etc.

1. Pound nails into the tube in a pattern that follows just next to the seam of the tube--a spiral down and around. Pound in two more tracks of nails following the same pattern, but now away from the seam. You will easily use a box or more of nails. Kids may need an adult to start the nail for them, then they can hammer it in. 

2. Next, seal one end tight with duct tape. We made an X pattern and then covered all the holes and then streched a piece of duct tape around the top of the tube to hold it all tight.

3. Fill the rainstick. When you look in you will see the pattern of the nails you hammered. Put in a generous amount of dried beans, lentils, rice, small pasta, and popcorn. You can test how the stick will sound by covering the open end with a jar top and tipping the stick over. We checked twice and put in more stuff before we were satisfied.

4. Close the other end of the rainstick with duct tape. Then use colored duct tape and/or masking tape to cover the whole stick. This will keep the nail heads from sticking out.

5. Play your rainstick by turning it upside down and letting all the dried food pieces hit the nails on their way down. 

Digital Microscope

This week at small groups, the kids learned how to use our class's new digital microscope. It is called a Dino Lite. We can magnify any object that the kids want to bring to the science table. Then, we can take a picture and save it to the computer. See if you can guess what the following objects might be.

To find out what they are, place your cursor over the picture and look at the bottom of your browser. The picture's name is at the end of the link to the picture that shows up there.

Jazz on A Saturday Night

As part of our focus on music, we read the book Jazz on a Saturday Night, which I had ordered from Scholastic last month without really knowing the story. It turns out, the book introduces a dream team of Jazz musicians as if they were playing together as one band for an audience in a club. It focuses on the instruments they play. First, there is Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis on the trumpet. The kids remembered Louis from when we sang "What A Wonderful World" earlier in the year. Then there is John Coltrane and Charlie Parker on the saxophone. Their horns have a conversation. Next, Max Roach on drums. Thelonious Monk is the keyboard player, Stanley Clark plays stand up bass (we noticed how big the case was for that) and finally, Ella Fitzgerald was the singer, whose only instrument was her voice in the microphone.  The cool thing was, after seeing the ensemble playing together in the book, the bandstand in the classroom during play time became more cohesive. They pretended like they were playing music together.
I realized, as I was reading and explaining to the kids who the real people were in the book, that I had CDs of all of them at home except Charlie Parker and Max Roach. I burned CDs at home and made a new playlist for the iPod. Today, during play time, I was able to play the music of all of these greats for the kids. They really got a kick out of me belting out "Don't Fence Me In" with Ella Fitzgerald. It was great to see the band pretend today with the music in the classroom reflecting the people we had learned about from Jazz on a Saturday Night.