Rainbow Room is busy exploring traditional American Folk Songs.

Using recyclable materials, we designed and constructed a city with airplanes, soaring along the skyline. Each child created their own 3D house that included their photo inside.  A large child sized interactive airplane was built and painted for dramatic play. Flight attendants, pilots, boarding passes and creative movement were part of the fun.  Continuing our theme of exploring American folk songs, while riding in our plane, we enjoyed singing and acting out the song, “If I Were an Airplane.”

Ideas were inspired by the song “Row, Row, Row Your Boat, “then during art, we created a fleet of rowboats. We painted bowls, added popsicle stick oars and small people from our block area. Scientifically exploring the concepts of sink and float by filling our row boats with a variety of objects was fun.  Balancing boats with our toy people in the water was more of a challenge. The children also enjoyed playing in a large wooden boat experimenting with their own body weight.  How many friends needed to sit on each side of the boat to balance, before we could rock back and forth? The boat was then converted to a bridge, where the children had fun fishing with magnetic fishing rods and fish.

 

Our emergent curriculum led us to expand upon our transportation theme. Our airplane has now become a train, and we are having fun singing and acting out the song, “I’ve Been Working on The Railroad.” Making music with instruments is always fun, this was some of our friend’s first experience with a banjo!

Cooking is always a creative way to practice math and science skills! We counted scoops and cups, measured, poured, mixed and stirred ingredients; observing how they changed as they swirled around the bowl together.  Turn taking helps to foster team cooperation skills. Our apple sauce and pumpkin pies came out awesome!

It is always fun to go for a buggy ride and explore the neighborhood. Rainbow enjoyed a field trip to the Fire and Police Departments.  We brought along two of our pumpkin pies to share with our friends; the police and firefighters.  We had a nice visit with Officer Surette and were very happy with the stickers he gave us.

Heading into February our new theme will be centered on Winter, Bears hibernating and include songs and stories that foster understanding of these ideas.  We will start off with the Traditional American Folk Song “The Bear Went Over The Mountain” and see where that leads us!