We read two new Eric Carle books this week,  Today Is Monday and Pancakes, Pancakes; we also reread Mr. Seahorse in preparation for Father’s Day.  Today is Monday meets a new animal each day eating a new food, then revisits the others.  We learned a new song that goes with this book and it has quickly become our go-to song for walking in line!  Pancakes, Pancakes tells the story of a boy named Jack who wakes up with a craving for pancakes.  His mother shows him that pancakes don’t just appear; you need lots of ingredients!  Jack procures everything he needs, which turns out to be quite a lot of work, and then enjoys the fruits (and grains!) of his labors.  As always, Carle’s books provide a great jumping off point for a variety of interdisciplinary projects.  With a mixed-age group classroom like ours, there are many skills and challenge levels to meet, this unit has helped us to touch them all!

Math Projects:  Our students are all developing math skills at various levels, and our projects are always targeted at each of them.  Between the ages of 2.9 and 5, most children have learned to recite numbers in order, and then begin to recognize numbers in isolation and relate those numbers to quantities of objects. After reading Mr. Seahorse, we played a counting game in which children had to roll a set of dice, which determined how many baby seahorses they had to arrange around the big seahorse.  When we read Pancakes, Pancakes, we played a similar game in which each child was given a plate with a foam “pat of butter.”  The foam had a number written on it and they children had to arrange the designated number of paper pancakes on their plates.  We also sorted felt pancakes by size, along with several other sets of objects, including cars, ribbons, and cups.

Art Projects:  This week’s set of books offered several new and interesting art projects for us!  To start, we made our own frying pans!  Each child used a sturdy paper plate and a wide popsicle stick to create the familiar shape.  They painted the insides of their pans black, then added paper pancakes, foam “butter,” and even brown glue that looked like “maple syrup!”  For most of our art projects, we firmly believe that the children’s experience in the process of making the art is far more important to their development than the actual product they create.  In this case, however, making art that they could recognize and compare gave them a sense of accomplishment, as well as a new prop for dramatic play!  We also explored painting with a new medium this week: pancake batter!  We mixed up some pancake mix, added some watercolor to tint it, and let the children have a blast smearing the thick, goopy mess all over their paper.  This was most certainly a process-oriented project!  Some children cultivated a delicate, fine manner of using their finger tips to create soft lines while others used their whole hands and quickly ran out of mix as they used so much of it.  It was an adventure, to say the least!

Sensory Projects:  Pancakes, Pancakes certainly offers plenty of opportunity for sensory projects as well as art and math.  We talked about the 5 sense and how we use them to experience pancakes.  We can see, smell, taste, and touch pancakes, but it’s difficult to hear them.  Next, we made a chart with checks and x’s indicating which sense we used for pancakes.  After that, we talked about other objects and made similar marks on the graph.  How do we experience kittens?  Socks?  Paint brushes?  We ended the week on a high note by making our own pancakes!  Just like Jack in the story, we mixed flour, milk, and eggs to make our batter, then carefully cooked them on the griddle.  But, just like Jack in the story, we needed butter and jam as well, so we made our own!  We placed cream in small baby food jars with two marbles, then jumped, danced, and shook them until we had smooth, creamy butter!  Another small group used potato mashers to pulverize strawberries into a smooth, jam-like texture.  What a delicious way to end the week!

We’ve added a new element to our classroom social curriculum:  The Friendship Bucket!  As teachers and parents notice children demonstrating friendly behavior toward one another, the children are given a ticket with their name and the date written on it.  They place their tickets in the bucket and we talk, as a group, about how their friendly behavior makes our classroom a nicer place to grow and learn. Once we have 100 tickets in the bucket, we’ll earn a Hot Dog Party!  Here’s hoping that silly Mo Willems pigeon doesn’t show up…