Spaghetti Day

The Ss learning continues this week with super spaghetti fun.

We started our spaghetti day by reading this,

This Caldecott winning book by Tomie dePaloa is a funny tale about what happens when we don't pay attention to directions.  A young assistant almost destroys his village with spaghetti, but luckily Strega Nona arrives back home in time to save the day.

The children laughed with delight as this tale unfolded.

Now we were ready for some spaghetti surprises of our own.

We learned about patterning and counting by

making spaghetti sculptures.  This activity develops eye/hand coordination, small motor skills, and early math skills, such as counting, measuring, and patterning.

This little fellow is just learning to write.  He holds his crayons, paint brushes, and pencils with a fist grip.  This activity will help him develop the ability to hold his pencils correctly to write.

Making a pattern.

Proud little artists.

Now it was time to explore spaghetti in a different form.

Before the children arrived I cooked a big pot of spaghetti, added a little bit of oil so it would not stick as it cooled then put it into two bins to cool and wait for the children to explore.

Adding in tools I found at the Dollar Tree store and what wonderful learning fun!

Sensory play is crucial to the development and education of the pre-school child.  

From birth, children have learned about the world by touching, tasting, smelling, seeing, and hearing. Sensory play also contributes in crucial ways to brain development. Think of it 

as “food for the brain.” Stimulating the senses sends signals to children’s brains that help to strengthen neural pathways important for all types of learning. 

Plus, it's fun.  Kids love to squish, squeeze, touch, and feel.

"Ewww, it feels like worms, Ms. Pamela.  It's cold."

"My spaghetti is heavy and it's slimy."

We talked about how the cooked spaghetti was different from the dried, uncooked.  We broke some dry spaghetti and put it in a cup of water to watch through out the day and see how water might change it.

The children explored the spaghetti for about thirty minutes then they grew tired so it was time to introduce a new element,

PAINT!  

The children spent almost an hour dipping strands of cooked spaghetti into different colors of paint and dragging them across their paper.  I had them write dotted Ss first, just so they did not lose the connection with our letter of the week.

After making many, many, MANY spaghetti paintings they finally grew weary and so it was time to switch things up a bit and instead of painting with the spaghetti, paint the spaghetti.

"Look, Ms. Pamela, it looks like it has spaghetti sauce on it."

"I like yellow.  I want to make mine yellow."

We talked about how the spaghetti changed colors as we added more and more paint.  The children noticed that when they painted red over the spaghetti painted yellow it turned orange.

And this is how you know they had a good time.  Don't worry, Mom, it washed right off.

You can't have a spaghetti day and not eat spaghetti for lunch now can you?  

See you after nap.

Rested and raring to go we checked in with our spaghetti in the water to find it was a sticky, wet mess.  I asked the children what they thought had happened and this is the answer I liked best, "The water melted our spaghetti."  I love the way kid's minds work!

"We want to play in the gebbies, Ms. Pamela."  So, they gobbled down their snack and we revisited the spaghetti sensory tub.  There was much laughter as they buried each other's hands and flung around the spaghetti.  Much messier this afternoon than it was this morning.

After they tired of exploring the spaghetti independently, we made spaghetti Ss.

First we wrote our dotted Ss's

Then we traced our big S with glue and...

D chose to use long strands of spaghetti to make his S while E broke her's up into smaller, more manageable pieces.  Each used their own style but both ended up with a spectacular spaghetti S.

With a day so rich in sensory experiences, I couldn't resist throwing in one more so I rolled out the...

play-dough. 

 The kids rolled snakes and used cookie cutters to make snowmen and snowflakes.  Then we rolled the clay and used S mats to make play-dough S's.

What a wonderful, Ss day.

See you tomorrow

Ms. P