Out into Jenkintown We Go!

We took another walk into Jenkintown today to look at houses. Before setting out, we talked about our walk at Morning Meeting, asking, "What do you thinking we will see in the neighborhood?"
Ella: The houses will be different than the other houses.
Wills: I think the big kids are going to make the playground different.
Madison: I think we are going to see the house just like yours in the classroom.
Gabby: We can see a lot of houses maybe a burned house.
Madigan: Some house can be different like different chimneys.
Paddy: My idea is we are going to see different houses like brown and blue.
Jacob: My idea was a little teeny house.
David: Maybe we will see a dog house on our trip.
Sophia: Brown and blue.
Mimi: Something special like a swing and a slide.
Zara: I am doing a secret big surprise.
Matthew: We might go to David's house.

We walked across the campus, stopping to observe the creek and to brandish sticks.

We crossed Washington Lane, and spotted a church and steeple, which meant we had to do our finger play:

Here is the church.

Here is the steeple.

Open the doors,

And there's all the people!

We saw a few houses, and Ella found a perfect tree for sitting on to do our sketching. The children all found spots, and began sketching.

On this second walk of observational drawing, the children's ideas, observation skills and drawings skills are developing!

During Choice Time, we worked on another iteration of color mixing, this time with paint. The thick tempera paint has very different properties from water or liquid water colors. The children used squeeze bottles to slowly add colors together, swirling them with paint brushes, then putting them to the paper to test our different shades. They quickly learned that when thy mixed all the colors togetehr, they got different beautiful shades of brown!

We also:

Neighborhood Drawings and Holiday Crafts

We started the day looking at photographs from our drawing adventure yesterday. Some Turtles chose to work on some more images, today with the colored pencils. At Morning Meeting, the teacher asked:

What did we see in the neighborhood?
Ella: We saw some houses. Some houses were different than other houses.
Madison: We saw a big tree with houses.
Jacob: Yeah, I saw that too.
Wills: I saw a ribbon atttached to the house. It had a chimney and brick.
Madigan: I was up on the hill. On the back of the house, there was a ribbon.
David: I saw a house that had a tirangle. On the house that had a ribbon, I saw a garage.
Gabby: David and me wrote a pitcure. We saw a red car going by.
Jacob: I saw a great big tree with leaves. There was a hole on it.
Patrick: I saw a big house. It looked like red and dark white and red.

It was fascinating to hear their descriptions of what they remembered and to correlate them to the drawing that they had done, where each person represented their thoughts and point of view.

Wills's grandparents brought in holiday craft projects to do with the Turtles. There were sticker cars and magic rainbow scratching sticks.

Other happenings of the day:

The Little Frogs brought bells out onto the playground, which of course led to rousing reditions of "Jingle Bells."