There are never dull moments here at Harbor City School, and this week certainly proved that!  With quite a few of our families on vacation this week, we anticipated a slightly quieter-than-usual week.  We should have known better!  We began our week decorating our letters of the week with vegetables.  Each child was given a sheet of vegetable pictures to cut out and paste onto their large V.  For those students who wanted an extra challenge, we offered sheets with fruits and vegetables.  Their task was not only to cut out the fruits and vegetables, but also to sort them and only glue the veggies onto their letters!  All of the preschool children benefited from fine motor practice, as some of our younger Tugboats are just learning the proper way to hold and use scissors.  Others are mastering the coordination need to cut around, as opposed to through, paper objects.

Tuesday saw more beautiful weather, extended play time outside, and a festive art project in which we used vegetables as paint brushes!  The children had an opportunity to explore potatoes, corn, onions, green beans, asparagus, and broccoli in their whole forms.  We smelled them, used our fingers to feel the different textures, and talked about how each vegetable was different from the rest.  Next, we dipped the vegetables in red, yellow, or blue paint and experimented with the different kids of marks each one made.  Who doesn’t love playing with their food?!

Wednesday brought a dramatic dip in temperature that none of us were prepared for or too happy about.  We ventured out into the gray to discover that the small playground, which we enjoy when the large playground is full, was extremely noisy: there was a large drainage truck parked next to it!  The Tugboats just adore trucks, especially less common ones like this, so we spent a few minutes observing it and hypothesizing as to what its job was.  Ultimately, we decided that this truck needed some competition for noisiest thing on the block and held our own Loud Contest!  We warmed up our voices and shouted, screamed, and squealed as loud as we could, but to no avail.  That truck would not be quieted!  We returned to school to enjoy music class after our one-week break.  The slightly smaller than usual group, coupled with the children’s growing expertise with the class structure and expectations, made for a very smooth, quick class.  Many of the children are becoming quite adept at replicating rhythms and matching pitch!  Both of these tasks are a developmentally-appropriate challenge, not out of reach but not an expectation, for children of the preschool age group, and really highlight the many different learning styles of our students.  Those who are naturally more musically inclined show a sense of ease with singing and rhythm sticks, while others are enjoying the practice and exposure.

We continued our veggie exploration on Thursday as Erin, our parent helper, brought us gardening tools and peas to plant in our plot at the Bremen St. Community Garden!  The children loved digging holes, planting peas, and watering them in preparation for the spring.  Back inside, we used play dough and seeds to create low-relief sculptures!  Some children made faces, others made flowers, and others still made abstract works of art.  Everyone enjoyed the feel of pressing the seeds firmly into the dough, which is such a different sensory experience than drawing or painting in two dimensions.  We also made a bar graph of our favorite vegetables!  It turns out, some of our friends were a bit creative in their responses: as parents saw the graph at pick-up, we heard a lot of “Wow, she’s never even eaten that!” and other similar responses.  Perhaps they’ll try them now!

For project time today, we switched away from vegetables to another V-topic that many children at this age adore: volcanoes!  Thanks again to Erin and Kristy’s curriculum support, we were able to build a play-dough volcano around an empty bottle, which was loaded with vinegar and soap.  Once we added some baking soda, the contents of the bottle erupted into a foamy, lava-like mess!  The Tugboats also watched a short video of an actual volcano eruption and noticed how our experiment was similar, it was also much more fun and safe than a real volcano!