Artists at Work

Dear Parents,

This week we continued with our art theme. The children learned about Claude Monet's style of painting.  Monet created his lily picture by using layers of white and colored paints.  

The children created their own version of a water lily by tearing blue, green, and violet strips of tissue paper and then gluing them onto white paper to make a pond.  They then placed a cup onto white, green and pink paper, and tore around it to make several circles. They crumbled  up the circles and glued  them onto the "pond," to make lily pads and flowers. Their hard work paid off in the end.  The results were spectacular! We added the children's pictures to our Famous Artist's Bulletin board.  Please stop by to see them.

The next artist that we were inspired by was Wassily Kandinsky.  e was a Russian artist born in 1866.  He was one of the first artists to develop abstract art - art that doesn't show people, objects or scenes.  He is known for creating striking pictures using circles in contrasting colors. 

The children created their own striking pictures by drawing circles, with oil pastel crayons, and then painting around the circles with watercolors. It was such a fun learning experience for the children. The children were first hesitant to paint over their circles, but they now know that crayons are resistant to paint, and will show right through it. 

What was even more exciting for us was watching the children draw circles at the writing table, similar to the ones they had done
during the previous art project.

We ended the week by doing two exciting science experiments. The first one we did was a magic colored milk science project. We first filled the bottom of a plate with milk.  We then dropped food coloring onto the milk.  We dipped a cotton swab into dish- washing detergent. We finally touched the coated swab to the milk and voila....we saw an explosion of colors swirling around in the plate.  Ask  your child about this. 

 

 

 

We did a sink and float experiment with an egg. We filled two plastic cups with water. In one cup we added  6 tablespoons of salt and mixed it until it dissolved.  We then placed one egg in each of the containers and observed which egg floated and which egg did not.  The explanation is simple - density!  The egg in the salt water floated and the one in the plain water did not.  Because salt water is denser than fresh water, the egg does not end up sinking like it usually does.

In math  this week we continued to make patterns with Unifix cubes.We counted and sorted them, as well. The children also had a fun learning experience playing with our new math games.



Resting after a hard day's work

Love,

Ms. Bonne & Ms. Barbara