Seriously Messy Fun - States of Matter - Solids

In kindergarten at our one day a week homeschool program we're spending the month of January exploring states of matter as we talk about how the world works.  States of matter is easily shown through water since the liquid/freezing/steam temperatures are easily achieved in the classroom.  The first week in January we explored ice, water, and steam.  Last week we focused only on ice as a solid.

 We made lists of attributes of a solid and played with ice all day long.  We started off with an ice painting activity.  This worked so well.  The colors were phenomenal and the kids had a blast.  I had frozen ice cubes with food coloring mixed in and then let the kids go wild.  When they were done with their paintings we dabbed off the extra liquid with paper towels.  The paintings dried more quickly than any of our other art has which made it easy to put away and move on to playing with ice blocks and "fishing for ice cubes".  

Next week - liquids!

Options Kindergarten 10-17

I apologize that it has taken me so long to get this posted!  We had such a fantastic time in kindergarten on Friday.  We kicked off our section of the body unit about germs and had a blast doing it!  We started the day with the great glitter germ experiment.  Adding some glitter to my hand before shaking everyone's hands in the class caused our "germs" to spread everywhere!  We all had germs on us, on the pillows, on the carpet!  The glitter germs were everywhere!  We read a few stories explaining about germs and then we set off writing our own stories about germs.

 We spent plenty of time recreating viruses and bacteria, white and red blood cells, and playing with them to recreate what happens.  There were many white blood cell play dough pieces that "ate" pompom germs!  We had "blood veins" made from red rolls of paper and immediately had the good blood cells attacking the bad germs!

 Using gelatin plates we made handprints of each child and I'm HOPING they turn out fantastic for us to examine our germ growth on Friday.  We painted germs and wrote in our journals about germs as well.

We're continuing our "Body Percussion" unit during music time which encourages stomping, clapping, patting and snapping.  That snapping is hard to do!  In math we worked on counting by 10's and explored base 10 blocks.

We had a fantastic day of learning and I look forward to another great day on Friday!