Salad spinner art

Today we started doing something that neither we nor our teachers had ever done before. We did “Salad Spinner” art. You may be wondering what is “Salad Spinner” art? Well, you place a small paper plate or piece of round paper that fits inside the basket part of the salad spinner. You prepare paints in various colours that are a little bit liquidy so that you can drip or pour the colours onto the plate.

You select the colours that you want and put them onto the paper plate or paper; and then you spin. And you spin, and you spin. And of course you have no idea what your art work is going to look like. If you look at all of our plates, you will be amazed at how different each one looks. And they are all beautiful.

Not only were we amazed at the patterns on the paper plates but the design inside the salad spinner was really beautiful. It too was a work of art.

We are not sure what we will use these exquisite art works for and we may just put them up for an Autumn/Fall display. We have a few more things in the classroom that are changing the look for our room. We have taken away all of our colourful things that were on display and are now putting natural objects. We started off by collecting autumn leaves in the park which we have placed on our large sensory tray. We will play with it tomorrow and feel the textures of the leaves and compare them as well as the colours.

In the park, many of us were so happy to participate in preparing our sensory leaf table and we collected brown, yellow, orange, soft, smooth, crinkly etc. leaves. We were amazed at how different leaves look and feel when you touch them.

Our first circle time was a long discussion about nature and things that are a part of nature. Shelley asked us what sort of things we can find in a park.

Vincent: “Spiders”

Lucinda: “Cherry blossoms and shells”

Miyu: “Slide”

Lilian: “Snake”

William L: “Pumpkins”

Alexis: “Rocks”

Shelley: “Flowers”

Then our discussion became more specific.

Shelley: “Where does milk come from?”

Lilian: “A cow”.

Shelley: “What part of the cow do you think the milk comes from?”

Miyu: “The mark” (touching the lower part of her tummy)

We are not sure what a mark is but we knew that she knew where the milk came from.

Koh: “It comes from the pooh” (pointing to his bottom)

We all have many different thoughts about things and our teachers listen to what we are saying and let us imagine and wonder, which we love to do. Then Shelley asked us another question about eggs.

Shelley: “And where do you think an egg comes from?”

Lilian: “A hen”.

Shelley: “And how does the egg come out from the hen?”

Lilian: “The hen sits and then in the morning, she stands up and the egg moves. And then, out of the egg comes a baby bird”.

Shelley: “I still don’t know how the egg comes out”.

All of us looked at her and were not sure what to answer; which of course is also okay. Then we looked at a few different things from nature. We looked at pine cones and Lilian thought that you found them on the ground, while Alexis said that they grow on trees. Shelley told us to look at them next time we are in nature, to see if they really do grow from the ground or do they grow on trees. Our pine cones were small and big. We also looked at bark which is the skin of the tree. We looked at the skin on our arms and felt that it was smooth. We touched two pieces of bark which were different shades of brown. One piece was rougher than the other one. We only looked at a few things and will look at more tomorrow in our early circle time.

When we came back from the park, we lay together and did deep breathing, while cooling our bodies down. We sang our “Dong guri” song and then we sat up, stood up and held hands and made a circle. Then we looked at some laminated autumn leaves and counted them. We counted six and then six of us stood up, each with an autumn leaf and we sang and dramatized a new song. Those of us who were on the mat were the big wind. And the poem went like this:

“5 little leaves so bright and gay,

were dancing about on a tree one day.

                                          Mr. Wind came in from town and ……..woooooooooo

                                    One little leaf came tumbling down”.

Each time we sang ‘One little leaf came tumbling down’, one of our friends who were holding a leaf, let go of their leaf so that it tumbled to the ground. It was a fun song and we look forward to swopping roles so that the wind can have a turn to be a leaf and vice versa.

The last thing that we did for our weaving art work was put our final finger print on it. We are thrilled with the finished product and now Shelley is going to get it framed so that one of us can have it in our homes…….

Thanks for a great day today and we hope that the next typhoon will come soon so that Monday, our Sports Day, will be a beautiful clear day.

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel.