Thursday, April 15, 2010

Grins & Squiggles: How Does Your Garden Grow?

We met Tuesday night for a special edition of Grins & Squiggles! With spring in full bloom, we decided to go with a garden theme. Miss Debbie led us in a caterpillar finger play:

The Fuzzy Caterpillar
(Tune: The Itsy Bitsy Spider)

The fuzzy little caterpillar
climbed upon a leaf.
She spun her little chrysalis,
and then fell fast asleep.
While she was sleeping,
she dreamed that she could fly.
And later when she woke up,
she was a butterfly!


Then, Miss Debbie told the story of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, using a board book and interactive story boards. We worked on identifying various fruits and vegetables.







After story time, we broke off into groups. Some of the children stayed inside the PAT room for potato stamping, which promptly turned into finger painting, thanks to some fabulous imaginations!



Who's afraid of a big, bad mess? WE'RE NOT!!!



Our hallway activity consisted of hands-on gardening. Each child was able to plant a starter flower in a peat pot. We also planted pole bean seeds into small cups so that the children could witness the process of germination at home. Our students had no problem digging in and getting their hands dirty! Look at all of their beautiful work:



We closed with another finger play:

Out in the Garden by Jean Warren
(Tune: Down by the Station)

Out in the garden early in the morning,
See the red tomatoes all in a row.
See the happy farmer coming out to pick them,
Pick, pick, pick, pick, off he goes.

Additional Verses: See the yellow squashes all in a row; See the blueberries all in a row; See the green string beans all in a row; See the orange carrots all in a row; See the purple cabbages all in a row.


The older children were assigned a visual representation of each vegetable, and came up to form a row as we sang the appropriate verse. Not only did we learn to identify our veggies, we also worked on our colors!

All in all, we had a very successful garden edition of Grins & Squiggles. Hope to see you all next time!

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