The kids have been talking about storms, soooo.....we decided to explore them a little more. I found some books on weather and we read them. We talked about rain storms, wind storms, and hail storms. We talked alot about Thunder and Lightnening because the thunder is the scarey part. Some of them remembered the big storm we had last year when the power went out and trees were down everywhere. We saw some pictures of houses that had been blown down, but I assured them that the wind around here does not get that strong.
They are being the wind....blowing the clouds around. (they wanted yellow to blow) 
We also have little boats at the water table. I was encouraging them to blow the boats around like the wind.....Kamil needed his goggles to get the job done right!
We are learning about birds. What are birds, what do they eat, what do they do, where do they live, how do they fly, what do they look like, etc....In order to see what they look like, we needed to make these nifty binoculars to see them with. The only part I really helped with was the punching of the holes in the side and tying the string....however their were a couple that could do that part also. We taped, painted, holed, and tied...and then, we were ready for a bird watch. We found some cool crows....they eat anything...really, anything. We found some finches, so we put up a finch bird feeder. We found some Steller Jays. Some people call these Blue Jays...(my mom did, so I did, growing up) but Blue Jays are cute little quiet birds while Stellar Jays are obnoxious crazy mean birds. We found Robins, seagulls (I don't know why they fly over our house....we are 30 miles from puget sound) an Eagle and I think a Hawk. We will be making a chart of the birds that we see.
We taped some of the leaves that we collected on our walk, to toilet paper rolls and then painted them. The final result was odd...but the kids loved this project! They taped all by themselves and painted. Remember, most (not all, but most) of our projects are the "project vs product" approach. Meaning...your children are learning during the 'doing' of the project. And, you can tell I am not the one doing the project. The end product might not be so cute and fantastic to our eyes...but the children love them and are very proud of what they have been working on. When they say don't you love it???....you can say, "wow, you used many different kinds of leaves, can you tell me more about them?" After all our tree's were together, we had a forest!
the picture of the squirrel on the left cracks me up....he looks like he is yelling....
squirrel tag....we roll a die and move our pieces(buttons) across the board. Black one way...brown the other. With the older kids you can tag and send someone back, but we just go across. The first one to the opposite side wins.
I got this game at http://www.lakeshorelearning.com/ They LOVE this one. The die only goes up to 3 though. Roll the die, count the peanuts, and put them in the bag.
The playdough table has squirrel and acorn cut outs, rolling pins and brown playdough with gold sparkles!
Acorn counting book from http://www.childcareland.com/ .
We cut out squirrels, crushed wheat chex, glued it on, and wrote a story about our squirrel. I will try to post more this week.
