Working at the Car Wash in Preschool

We made a car wash today in preschool.  This project is something that I intended to do last week during Transportation week, but I I couldn't quite get it all together then.  Fortunately, we play with our bikes on the playground almost every day, so there's always a need to keep them clean.

The idea for this project first came to me when I first started working with plastic tablecloths for different projects.  They have just the right weight for this kind of project.  They blow nicely in the wind, but still hang down nicely for the kids to drive through them.

I used two dollar store tablecloths for the streamers.  It turned out that the best streamer length for the boxes that I was using was 36", which is one-third of the total length of the tablecloth.

After I folded the tablecloth into thirds, I cut the streamers by aligning all three of my pieces on top of each other and then folding up one edge several times so that I could cut the whole streamer length with one small cut:

Using a paper cutter can be a risky way to cut them, because if you cut too far you will cut the whole length of the tablecloth into single strips (which is not the end of the Plastic Steamer World, but it does make things a bit trickier).  However, when I use the paper cutter for this I cut slowly and stop as soon as I feel the blade cut through the thick folds.

 

When you're done, you should have a long strip of streamers ready to tape on to your box:

My original idea was to use refrigerator boxes for this projects.  I envisioned that I would cut out two sides of the box, creating a tall tunnel for the Little People to drive through.

However, I am finding that locating good, extra-large boxes is much harder in general than it used to be.  In fact, this problem has turned me into somewhat of a Box Stalker, but that's the story for another day.   Fortunately, last week I came across some tall skinny boxes up for grabs at our Teacher Center that I figured would work.

I taped my streamers to one long edge of one box, and both long edges of another (I used clear packing tape for this):

 Here is the trial run with a single archway in my living room:

Because of the size of the car wash, I obviously had to assemble it at school.  I came with the streamers already taped on, and had the kids help me set it up.  I made two archways as shown above for the drive-through part.  As you can see, I had to space the side boxes out as far as possible for the various trikes and wagons to fit through.   I just used duct tape as well as I could to connect these archways together.  I then taped the two boxes on the ground to the arches to give it some stability.

This worked fine, and the Little People loved it. However, when I do it next year, I will definitely work harder to find refrigerator boxes.  The stability of those would have been worth it.  However, on the other hand, using these multiple boxes makes it a little easier to store.  I was able to take the boxes apart to store in our toy shed and promise the kids that we could play Car Wash on Monday, too.

 Here are some of the Little People enjoying the "water spray":

 As a side note, when I got done attaching the steamers to the boxes I had a few extra pieces left.  So I gathered bunches of them together and tied them to make car "polishers".

This and a few other car washing "tools" gave the Little People who were waiting for bikes something to do until it was their turn to get clean.  (You can see below that I provided the dusters that we used when we painted flowers):

Then, to top it all off, I used two tissue boxes and the very last of the streamers to make two car washes for the cars that we play with in our room on the carpet.  That way the Car Wash Fun could continue on even after we went inside:

All in all, it was great fun, and something that I think the Little People will enjoy and remember for quite some time.

Name Cheers in Preschool

Have you ever had anything to cheer about with your preschoolers?   Each spring I like to have my Little People make Name Cheer books.   These are accordian-type books that the kids make which have a page for each letter of their name.  (I originally got this idea from a Mailbox magazine.) Once the kids make their book and practice a bit, they take turns standing up in front of the class with pompoms and leading the class in their Name Cheer, with the "audience" cheering the each letter back:

"Give me a B!"  (B!)
"Give me an O"  (O!)
"Give me a B!"  (B!) 
 "What does that spell?"  (Bob!).  They love it, and it helps everyone involved with recognizing and naming letters, not to mention helping the cheer leaders learn how to spell their own names.

However, what they love even more is using and getting to keep their own pom poms.  Last year I just borrowed a coteacher's pom poms for Name Cheers, but this year I wanted to let everyone take a pom pom home so they could do their cheer for their family.  So I decided to make some.

After searching on Pinterest I found this Pom Pom tutorial:

Source: marthastewart.com via Julie on Pinterest

I basically followed the instructions from the link above, and found the directions very easy to follow. Therefore, I will just point you to that link for the basic pom pom steps instead of trying to replicate what is already well-explained.

I will say that I seriously overestimated the amount of tissue paper that I needed for 25 pom poms.  To keep you from doing the same, I will tell you that it worked out that it took approximately one standard sheet of tissue paper for each pompom.  However, since I used more than one color on each pom pom,  I cut several different-colored sheets of tissue paper at a time and mixed up the colors as I went to make multi-colored pom poms.  Like this:

One difference that I made from the original tutorial was that I did not wrap my cut tissue paper strips around a dowel.    I made this switch largely for cost purposes, but also because the combination of Little People and dowels in my mind just makes me think of poking.  And who needs poking with the Little People?

Instead of a dowel I used toilet paper rolls.  One roll was too short of a handle, so I put two rolls together.

Fold one of the toilet paper rolls in in half lengthwise (like a hot dog).



Place the folded tube inside the non-folded one a few inches.

Then fold the unfolded one so that the folds line up with the already-folded inside tube: (I know, there are a lot of "folds" in that sentence - sorry.)

Hold them together tightly and wrap well with masking tape.  This will become your handle onto which you tape the tissue paper.

Using this as a handle, follow the instructions in the link as Martha suggests.

When I was done, I had a wonderful pile of pom poms for the Little People.

As a side note, I also made one pom pom out of my favorite new material, plastic tablecloths.

While it turned out cute, I still decided that tissue paper was the most cost-efficient choice for the large quantity I was making.

When all of our Name Cheer books were made, I put them all on our bulletin board with the available pom poms.  After the kids practiced saying the letters in their name, they got to choose the pom pom that they wanted and used it to lead their Name Cheer in front of the class.  Then they got to take the book and pom pom home and (hopefully) do their Name Cheer for their family.

Making the pom poms is definitely something that I would do again.  It was easy, inexpensive, cute, and highly popular with the Little People.  Definitely a keeper.

Rainbow Streamers in Preschool

This week was Letter R in preschool, and because of this I decided to do a Rainbow Theme.  I found lots of fun ideas to try, and we were pleased with most all of them.

One activity we especially enjoyed was our Rainbow Streamers.  I got the idea from a combination of two different places.

This pin from Pinterest:

Source: pre-schoolplay.blogspot.com via Julie on Pinterest 

and this post at Sense of Wonder talking about using streamers to learn about the wind.

The Sense of Wonder person used crepe paper as streamers, and the Pre-School Play person used plastic the she got from a "recycling bank".  (I've heard about these recycling centers from different bloggers in England and in Australia, and they really sound like wonderful places).

But alas, I have no such recycling bank, so I went to my new favorite and cheap material:  plastic tablecloths from the dollar store.

I got one tablecloth of each of the rainbow colors (and yes, I know this picture is sideways.  I keep rotating in my photo editing software, but then when I copy it here it goes sideways on me again.  I just don't know - my iPhone pictures seem to have trouble turning the right way sometimes.):

Then I used my handy paper cutter to cut the tablecloth into 1"strips.  At first I made streamers that were the  full length of the longest side of the tablecloth (108"), and while these were wonderful streamers, I deemed that they would be too long for the Little People.

So instead I made 54" streamers.  Since the tablecloths are 54" x 108", you can make 54 streamers if you cut them as long as the long side of the cloth, or 108 if you cut them short.  The only warning I have is to watch out if you have tablecloths coming from different stores/manufacturers.  Not all tablecloths are folded the same, and if not careful to check how each kind of folded you can end up with lots of short pieces.

Once I got my steamers cut, I folded them in half lengthwise and attached them with this simple knot to the curtain ring in rainbow-order.  (I just learned from the Internet that this is called a lark's head knot - learn something new every day.)   You will want to keep the knots loose, because you need them loose to be able to add the glue easily.  If you do as I did and tighten them at first, you will just need to loosen them later:

Once you have them on there and nice and loose, scoot them away from the bottom center of the ring:

Then place a dab of glue on the outside and inside of the ring and slide the streamers back over the glue.  I used Alene's craft glue.  Well, at first I used hot glue, but not surprisingly, it melted right through the plastic.  Once the streamer is over the glue, you can tighten up the knots, which will get the glue worked into the knot a little bit and secure it.

Here are the knots all tightened up:

And here are all the streamers ready for their car ride to school:

As you might imagine, the Little People have just loved the Rainbow Streamers.  They ran with them, let the wind blow them around, and threw them in the air to watch the streamers fly to the ground.

We still used the long set of streamers, but only as a wind-catcher on one of the playground trees. Of course, it was only a few minutes after I put it up there that I noticed a small cluster of the Little People standing solemnly around it with their hands on their heart saying the pledge of allegiance...  and while I could talk about how improper it might be or not be to say the pledge allegiance to something other than a real flag, I have to say first that I thought the association was clever of them.

To the best of my calculations, each streamer only cost $.14 each, which I think is pretty good, especially considering that $.08 of that is for the shower curtain ring.  That's not very much money for a lot of rainbow fun for the Little People.

Space Rockets in Preschool

Here's another fun Day/Night activity that we did last week.  Actually, this really went with our Space theme.  We did a Space week because we had so many fun things to do with Day & Night that we grouped the space-type activities into the second week.

I got the idea for these Space Rockets from this Pinterest post:

Source: alphamom.com via Julie on Pinterest

The person who made these actually made them as confetti rockets, but for some reason I just couldn't get excited about the idea of confetti flying all over our classroom.  Well, now that I think about it, that could have been kind of fun, but I don't think the custodian would have been happy at all about it.  And we all know that the custodian is one of those people that you want on your side.

So we made non-confetti versions.  Which means that we used plain ole' paper towel rolls with nothing in them.

We used:
paper towel rolls
paint
glitter
metallic poster board
glue
pipe cleaners (cut in half)
streamers made out of cut-up plastic tablecloth
masking tape

Now, this is one of those projects that is a combination of child-done art and teacher-done art.  But it's about 70/30, with 70% being teacher-done.  I admit that I really struggle with that, since I usually favor projects with the highest percentage of child-done art as possible.  But I will placate myself now by saying that sometimes a balance is okay. (And after I made it, I thought of some more ways to make in more child-done, which I will share with you.)

After the kids painted their tubes, I cut circles out of silver poster board for the cones.  I actually used the die cut machine at our local teacher center, and my circles were 4" wide.

I then cut a slit in the circles from the outside edge to the center of the circle, and then pulled the edges near the cut together to make a cone shape.  You can glue or staple this.  However, if you glue it, go ahead and take your pipe cleaner or string or whatever you are going to use to hang your rockets with and place this so it sticks out the top of the cone before the glue dries.  I did not do this, and then had to tape my pipe cleaners on the top, which I didn't think looked so good.

You can then glue your already-formed cones onto the tubes.  I placed my cones upside down in some old muffin tins, placed the tubes into the cones (so the whole rocket was basically upside down) and then squeezed in ample amounts of glue to secure the cone to the body.  In hindsight, I could have just done this with hot glue at home.  It would have been much quicker, and then the ample glue mentioned above would not have pooled in the tip on the cone, preventing me from sticking my pipe cleaners in the top for easy hanging. However, if you wanted to get the kids more involved in the project and you already stuck your pipe cleaners into the top of the cone as suggested above, the regular glue would be fine.

Once the glue is dried, you can add the fire.  For this I used my favorite new material:  cut-up strips of cheap vinyl table cloth from the dollar store.

The method that I used is as follows (although I will add disclaimer here that I am later not going to recommend this method):

I first cut my pieces of streamers from the red and orange table cloth.  My strips were about 1/4" wide and 8" long. I then wrapped masking tape sticky-side-out around the lapboard that I also use while doing these kind of jobs at home.  I then took the strips of plastic and attached them to the tape all the way around the board, so it looked like the picture below.  If you do it this way, make sure and leave enough spaces between the strips and/or above the strips to keep the tape sticky.

Once you have a nice length of tape with the streamers attached, you can cut a piece off and tape it to the inside bottom edge of your rockets, leaving the fire hanging out nicely.

I would strongly recommend that if you do it this way you get your tape and streamers ready right next to where the rockets are.   If not, you might make the mistake I did and get the tape and streamers ready at home and and then have to take all of this to school to finish making the rockets.  You might wrap several already-draped pieces of masking tape (one above the other) to a single empty cookie sheet and try to transport them without disaster in your car.  Trust me: It might look like a festive Cookie Sheet-Hula Party O' Fire, but in the end, it just looks like this, which is definitely what you don't want:

Actually, if I did it again, I would attach the streamers in an easier and much-more child-friendly way.  I would put out a strip of shiny silver tape on our work surface, sticky side up.  I would then let the kids put the streamers (and perhaps some silvery ribbons) onto the tape.  Then I would cut a piece of this decorated tape to the size we needed to wrap it around the circumference of the rocket once.  We would then tape it to the outside of the bottom of the rocket, so that the silver tape covers the beginning of the streamers.  That way we wouldn't have to worry about putting the tape inside the tube, and we would be adding a nice silver stripe to the rocket.

Regardless, here is one of our rockets hanging from our class ceiling:

Despite all of the trials of learning how to do this project, the kids love them, and they ask every day when we will take them down so they can take them at home.

Now I'll just have to plan something else to hang from the ceiling so we can take these down...

Learning About Day and Night in Preschool

Well, despite the fact that I have written nothing on the blog the last few weeks, the Little People and I have been very busy.

The week before last was our week to talk about Day and Night, and that was lots of fun.

This is the sign that I made to put out and show the parents of the Little People  what we're talking about.  You can find a whole set of them for sale in the Teacher's Notebook Store here.

 Out of the whole week, one of the most fun things that we did was to make Shooting Stars.

My inspiration was this post idea from Pinterest from the blog  www.firstgraderatlast.blogspot.com.  (Which is a blog that I really enjoy, by the way.)

Source: firstgraderatlast.blogspot.com via Julie on Pinterest

The author of the blog did this with her first graders and they loved it, so I decided to give it a try with the Little People.  The only change I made was to use something other than the crepe paper.  This is because last year I learned the hard way that crepe/tissue paper + moisture on the ground = big soggy mess, and with the wet weather we were having I didn't want the same thing to happen again.

So I thought for awhile about what I could use that would a)not go soggy in wet weather and b)still fly well and look cool doing it.

I finally came upon the idea of using these plastic tablecloths from the local dollar store.

I got several in some nice "shooting star" colors, and then cut a section of each one into small strips using my paper trimmer:

I ended up cutting them about 1/2" wide, and they were about 24" long.  Just using about a fourth of each tablecloth left me with all kinds of streamers to work with:

I then took them to school to have the kids make the stars as instructed on the blog.  Next time I do this with my kids (and I certainly will do this again) I will allot more time to separate and straighten the streamers.  This took the most amount of time.

However, it was worth the time spent, because the shooting stars flew wonderfully! After everyone made theirs we took them all outside and spent some time throwing them around.

This is an activity that I highly recommend.  In fact, my family at home still tosses my sample around the house any chance we get!