Teach Preschool » Sensory

Heart and hand prints in the salt tray in prek

Deborah J. Stewart, M.Ed. — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:53:55 +0000

I recently shared how we have started writing in the salt tray and I have to say, my kids love the salt trays. I have learned a few things about using a salt tray and have been exploring a few additional ideas to keep the salt tray experience interesting to my class…

What I have learned

The amount of salt you place in the tray makes a difference. I received an email from one of my readers and she gave me permission to share her salt tray tips and this photo with you (see below)…

Nancy Earnest says…

“We use a salt tray in our classroom and encourage the children to use just their fingers in the tray (vs sensory table when it has sand which is whole hand). Our salt tray has only about 1/3 cup of salt in it so that they get a visual of what they “write” in the tray. Having a dark color on the bottom of the container is valuable. Dark colored cake pans or cookie sheets work fine. And yes it does take some self control for them not to put their whole hand in. It happens but they gradually work towards appropriate use.”

Nancy's Salt Tray

I just love the tray Nancy uses in her classroom and after reading Nancy’s thoughtful insight to the salt tray, I went back and thinned down the amount of salt I had in each tray. Nancy was right, using less salt in the trays works much better for printing in the salt. I also found two sturdy boxes to use for my salt boxes. I set out the new salt boxes and a few heart shaped cookie cutters to let the children explore both printing and writing…

The children loved making prints with the hearts in our salt boxes. I added the heart shaped cookie cutters since we were talking about the shape of a heart in our lesson for the day…

I am going to keep my salt boxes as our “permanent” salt boxes but because I only had two salt boxes and four children wanted to play, I went ahead and spread the salt between four trays so each of the children could have their own salt tray to work with at the writing table…

I have already seen an improvement in the children’s use of the salt trays. One little boy eagerly practiced writing all the letters in his name – when he completed each letter he would shout, “Look Mrs. Stewart – I made a Z!”…

The children printed hearts, and made letters for quite some time before moving on to other things. I was very surprised when one of our boys came up with this super cute handprint with a heart shape in the middle then all the children wanted to give it a try…

Of course, watching the children make their heart and hand prints got me thinking that the “heart in the hand” would make a super cute art project for Valentine’s day too!!

Some of my students discovered that if you lightly shake the salt tray, the lines and shapes go away so you can start again…

I will continue to share the salt boxes (or trays) with the children and continue to encourage them to work on writing the words they know along the way. We are all learning something new from this experience each time we try it…

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Exploring what will float or sink in preschool

Deborah J. Stewart, M.Ed. — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 05:21:20 +0000

We have been exploring transportation and of course, boats were on the list. I didn’t have any toy boats but no worries – we discovered that there are other materials that can float across the water…

The children used Styrofoam trays for their “boats”. Our “river” was quite congested at times with all the boating traffic…

Before adding our Styrofoam boats, we talked about what might float and what might sink in the water. I set out some of our “math tokens” for the children to test in the water…

Oh and in case you are wondering what the white stuff is floating around in the water – that is “snow” that we had leftover in the tub from our snow globe sensory. The kids didn’t want to wait for me to rinse all the snow out so we had snowy water….

We discovered that our plastic lids can float but our cars and the seashells sank to the bottom of the tub….

To help the cars float across the river, we discovered that the cars could be placed on top of our boats and they wouldn’t sink…

I’m glad I never stopped to pick up any toy boats because these Styrofoam trays actually made great boats and they were great for exploring what sinks and floats!

Fun and Simple!

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Making squishy fishy aquariums in preschool

Deborah J. Stewart, M.Ed. — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 10:00:20 +0000

We explored fish a few weeks ago and made squishy fishy aquarium. You can see how to make these sensory gel bags by clicking here.

The children put green and yellow food color in their gel bags because Mrs. Stewart (me) was not thinking very clearly that day. For some reason, I had it in my head that green and yellow make blue. Have you ever had one of those days?

So instead of blue fishy bags we had a variety of green and yellow fishy bags. I am so glad children don’t really care about the final product as much as the process…

You can’t see the fish in there all that well in these pictures but the children also added foam fish to their gel bags…

I hung all our fishy bags in the window which made them tempting to walk by and feel throughout the day…

The light shining through makes our green and yellow squishy fishy bags quite a beautiful display…

So to make up for my brain lapse on color mixing, I served the children jello aquarium cups instead…

Yum but sweeeeet!

Linking up to No Time for Flashcards: Link and Learn

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Exploring pumpkin seeds in the preschool classroom

Deborah J. Stewart, M.Ed. — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 10:00:08 +0000

Pumpkin seeds are a wonderful resource for sensory, math, art, and play. We cut open two pumpkins last week and I saved the pumpkin seeds from both of them…

The children discovered that the inside of a pumpkin is very slimy and the seeds are slippery and wet…

I separated all the pumpkin seeds out from the slimy pumpkin guts and then I colored the seeds (later in the day) with a tiny bit of vinegar and food color. I am not so sure I would have needed to add the vinegar but it worked fine for me. I was given the idea of coloring the pumpkin seeds by Erica on my Teach Preschool on Facebook page. You can see Erica’s pictures here.

I spread the seeds out on some paper and let them sit over night. The next day, they were still a little wet so I baked them at a very low temperature (200 degrees) for a few minutes (about 15) until they were nice and dry. Then I brought them back to school…

The children explored the seeds with their hands…

They used cups to scoop and pour pumpkin seeds…

Then we set out cut-up brown paper bags from the grocery store to use as our canvas for seed mosaics…

The children squeezed out glue on their paper and then added pumpkin seeds on top of the glue…

Every child made their own unique design with the pumpkin seeds…

For this activity, I told the children they would need to make puddles with the glue instead of just lines so that the pumpkin seeds would have plenty of glue to stick too…

The next time I share this activity with the children, I will set out heavier paper like cardboard because I discovered if you bend the paper after the seeds dry on the glue – the seeds tended to pop off the paper…

After making their mosaics, the children used the remaining seeds to make pumpkin seed exploration bottles…

Some of the children filled the bottles all the way to the top and others added orange construction paper to their bottle too…

And yes, we had pumpkins seeds all over the table and floor by the time we finished. Here are our finished pumpkin seed exploration bottles…

And here are some of our completed pumpkin seed mosaics…

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Ketchup and Mustard waterplay

Deborah J. Stewart, M.Ed. — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 10:00:44 +0000

Along with our dramatic play with the grill, our painting on the grill, and our ketchup and mustard squeeze painting, we enjoyed some ketchup and mustard waterplay…

The original intent of this water table was to wash and dry dishes (which they did earlier that day) but the boys wanted to squeeze the left over yellow and red paint into the table after we were done painting. Since the bottles were pretty much empty, I thought this would be a good way to help me clean them up…

The water turned bright red at first then started turning orange as the boys added the “mustard”…

Using the squeeze bottles in the water table also led to exploring the flow of liquid and the use of fine motor skills to squeeze the bottles and practice controlling the flow of water from the bottle.

The lids inevitably made their way off the squeeze bottles so the boys could fill their bottles back up and do a little pouring…

With lots of practice like this, preschoolers are well on their way to being able to control the use of glue bottle!

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