Playing in the Rain and Playing with Color

Tracy Manning
May 8, 2016
2 min read

I love that your children (and our school's philosophy) make me go out in the rain. All this last week, it drizzled, misted, and poured. Had I been at home, I might have curled up with a book and cup of tea, but we went out for recess and our adventure walks. We got wet. We also saw frogs and salamanders, played with water, and watched leaves unfurl all around us. The world feels different in the rain, and I'm glad that I get out in it.

Group Play During Recess

The combination of mud, fresh wood shavings, and water made everyone gravitate to building mud pies, mud tea, mud salad, mud ice cream, and mud pizza cake. When this happens, we sit down at the end of recess for a shared feast. Each child reports what she or he has made, and we all dig in. It's become a bit of a tradition.

More Experiments with Color

This week we used watercolors to make warm paintings and cool paintings. The children noticed how the similar colors blended, and they noticed that they didn't make any of the browns or blacks that they sometimes make when mixing colors. We cut up our paintings and wove them back together. I was impressed with how quickly the children grasped the concept of weaving. I've done this before with young children and often found that they needed lots of adult support. This class jumped right in, was patient with the process, and quickly developed the skill of seeing where the pattern wasn't right and needed fixing.

We also experimented with bubble painting. It's a simple mixture: 1 part acrylic paint, 1 part dish soap, and 2 parts water. We put the mixture into cups, inserted our straws, blew until we had a nice mound of bubbles, and made a print on a piece of card stock. I encouraged the children to experiment with different types of blowing to see what made smaller or bigger bubbles and to play with colors, layering one on top of another.

Cinderella Stories from Around the World

We finished our study of Cinderella with a simple assessment. I asked the children to fold their paper into 4 equal parts, and then they wrote and drew 4 elements that these stories share. After they were done, we talked about what they had written and found that the class had come up with a total of 6 common themes. We discussed which of those elements were also found in the many other fairy tales we read over the past weeks and which elements were unique to Cinderella stories.

I hope you all had a wonderful weekend, and I'll see you on Monday!