Curds and Whey

On Friday we concluded our unit on spiders. 

We learned the nursery rhyme, "Little Miss Muffet".  We talked about what a tuffet is(a stool), and what curds and whey is (cottage cheese).  We did a little experiment and tried to make our own curds and whey.  I didn't try this ahead of time so this was truly an experiment. 

We used 1% milk (it called for whole milk but 1 % was what we had) and vinegar.  It called for warm milk and vinegar.  We let the milk get to room temperature and then added our vinegar. 

We mixed it up and it started to clump a little and separate. 

The kids got to look at it and then we let it sit during work time. 

After work time, this is what it looked like.

Here are the curds.  It didn't smell the greatest (really vinegary) and I took one for the team and tried it.  I told the kids that it didn't taste very good and they told me if it had sugar it would be better.  I told them that everything tastes better with sugar. (:  Yuck, it did not taste like cottage cheese!!  It did turn out like curds and whey though.

Some of our friends finished their spiders.  I love our art lessons because we show them how to make their project and during work time they get to make it.  If they need some guidance we will help but we really try to build independence and have them make theirs the way they want. 

We had show 'n tell on Friday and one of our friends brought in 3 different size grasshoppers, 2 different kinds of ladybugs, a wooly bear caterpillar and a millipede.  We put them out along with some magnifying glasses for the kids to observe.

At the easel, we painted spiders.  All the kids did great adding 8 legs on their spider.  Here's a little girl making her spider.

Work time

Spider tweezers

Pin pushing shapes

Giant pegboard

Number matching

Small pegboard

Eensy Weensy Spider

We sang "Eensy Weensy Spider" today and acted out the song with our felt board.  Everyone got to be a spider, the rain or the sun.  We had different color spiders so we sang.
The big "red" spider went up the waterspout.
Down came the rain and washed the spider out.
Out came the sun and dried up all the rain
And the big "red" spider went up the spout again.

Ask your child which they were.  We are going to leave this out during work time on Friday so the kids can work with this.  It was hard explaing what a waterspout.  I wonder if I can go to Home Depot, buy one, show it to the kids and return it after school.  Do you think they'd let me??  (: 

We sang the song, "Spider on the floor" by Raffi.  Each child got a spider ring and we pretended the spider was on the floor, our leg, stomach, neck, face and head. 

We also practiced our numbers with apples.

Art area

Table work:

Matching

Mirror polishing

Floor work:

Numbers

Letters

Numbers

Matching

Spiders

The Spider Poem
Spiders are not insects
Spiders have 8 legs
Spiders have four pairs of eyes
Spiders hatch from eggs

Spider webs are sticky
Spiders weave them tight
Spiders spin that silky string
Spiders weave webs right

This was a poem that we said when we talked about spiders!  Ask your child how many legs and eyes spiders have.  They are getting to be spider experts. 

We made our first art project this week.  The kids did great for their first time doing an art lesson. 

We sang the Eensy Weensy Spider together! 

We made our own spider!  Ask your child what they named it.  We took a black garbage bag, filled it with newspaper.  Here are the kids crushing up newspaper to stuff our spider.  I passed out a piece of newspaper to each of the kids and on the count of 5 we got to SMASH it up!

The letter of the week is R.  Each Monday the kids are really good noticing our new letter.  We sang our letter R song. 

R says rrr.

 R says rrr.

Every letter makes a sound. 

 R says rrrr. 

The kids came up with some R words.  Please talk to your child and try to come up with R words with them. 

We read "The Very Busy Spider" by Eric Carle. 

We had a great worktime!

As you can see we had a WONDERFUL day!!