Category Archives: Mouse Paint
Melting Ice Cubes
This week, we melted different color ice cubes and then mixed the resulting colored water together. We put our goggles on (because that’s what scientists do!):
I made the ice cubes using food coloring and these ice cube trays:
We made predictions about what we thought would happen while we watched the ice cubes melt. Some thought that one ice cube would melt and fill up the whole cup. Others said it would change to a new color. Some of the children thought we were going to let the ice cubes melt and then drink the juice that resulted.
We had to wait until the following day to check back on the ice cubes. We talked about what happened (they melted) and the differences. We drew in our science notebook a picture of how the ice cubes and cups looked when we started and then how they looked after they melted.
We also drew a picture in our science notebooks to show what happened when we poured red water into blue water, blue water into yellow water, and red water into yellow water. The kids were also curious about what happened when we mixed all the colors, so we did that too! 🙂
I saw two of my students acting out Mouse Paint at our Drama Work Station and it was awfully cute, so I took a picture:
It was so sweet, they were so into telling the story and had set up the props exactly in the same order I had when I modeled it for them–adorable! 🙂
Also, I made my Mouse Paint retelling cards into magnets for Magnet Work Station. It was a quick and easy thing to add to this station and the kids are having fun telling the story!
I got this magnetic board at IKEA for $9.99 on clearance when I went last summer. I’m not sure if they still have them, but you could always use an oil pan! 🙂
I thought I would show you some pictures of how we used my Mouse Paint Retelling Cards this week:
You can use them to finish the color sentences.
These are some more color sentences made with mouse puddles. Also, you can make color sentences requiring more interaction from your students. They have to put the complete sentence together.
Or use them with each other to make different combinations of color sentences. 🙂
You can purchase them on my Tpt store:
Click on the picture to go to my Tpt store. 🙂
I’m getting ready to do some work with my K kids on “Mouse Paint”…so what are your great ideas for this book? I’m going to do a big chunk with color mixing, retelling, and sequencing. Does anyone else have some more ideas? Is there a animated version of Mouse Paint? I like my K kids to be able to watch the story to help those who are more auditory/visual.
Also, all of my posts will now be posted right to my Kristen’s Kindergarten Facebook page, so be sure to “like” us so you can quickly catch up on posts. 🙂
I’ve just posted some retelling cards on my Teacher’s Pay Teachers store. I’ll be using these cards the week after next to help my kiddos retell “Mouse Paint” and introduce our Pocket Chart Work Station. I also plan to make a set for use on my light table using transparencies. 🙂 This would also be a great set to use with “White Rabbit’s Color Book”
Here are some more new pictures from my classroom:
Our Meal worms…
Meal worms are really easy to keep and you get to watch the life cycle happen over and over again. I just put corn meal in the bottom and some apple slices and carrots. You also will need to add some water in a dish that the meal worms cannot get in to keep the humidity up.
I got the 2 tanks, lids, a gram scale (for weighing the meal worms), 2 microscopes, and a hand held microscope from a Donors Choose grant in May.
Here are some new pictures of my Literacy Work Stations.
This is the ABC/Word Work Station.
Right now, we have letter cards on a ring in the bag with Wikki Stix. The children make the letters with the Wikki Stix.
The children also have the opportunity to put Wikki Stix on each others names at the ABC/Word Work Station. These are laminated.
Here is our Listening Station. The black and white bags hold the books and CD. The headphones are stored in a cleaning tote. I am using the head headphones from my non-working leap pads.
I also have several books and their CD’s available on the ledge just above the books. I try to put the newest titles on the ledge and the older ones in the bags.
The is our Pocket Chart Station. Last year, I used a full size chart, but this year, I decided to make it more kid-sized and used these pocket charts from the Dollar Spot at Target.
I took all of my kids pictures and glued them on sentence strips next to their names and then laminated them. The children sort the names by “Boy/Girl” or Alphabetical order. I’ve also added a poem about Pets (you can find it in the Interactive Charts Book that goes along with Building Blocks).
This is my Drama Work Station with the Chicka Chicka Tree in the top bag. Two other bags also now hold the drama props for Brown Bear, Brown Bear and Mouse Paint (I got them all through a Donors Choose grant).
A look inside the Chicka Chicka Bag. There is the large tree, the velcro letters, and an copy of the book.
The Brown Bear, Brown Bear bag. The book is missing…! 😉
Overhead Work Station
These are the overhead transparencies I made to go along with Brown Bear and Chicka Chicka. The children use the pictures of them I printed on transparency sheets (see two posts ago) and put them in the blanks. They then read the words and then put a new child’s picture in.
I also made some to go along with Cookie’s Week and I’ll post those soon.
Big Book Work Station
I found these cute pointers in the Dollar Spot at Target and we use them for pointing to words in Big Books and for reading the names and words at Pocket Chart Station.
Now for a few random things! 🙂
I got these puzzles at Wal-Mart for $3.00 each. They show the life cycle of a frog and a butterfly. We’ll be using the butterfly puzzle next week, when we learn about Monarchs. I’ll have it in my Science Work Station.
I also found these cute signs in the Target Dollar Spot. They are great for using signals rather than trying to talk over all the children! 🙂 I use them as reminders when we are sitting on the floor. They work really well!
I had a few questions about the kind of hooks I use to hang all the bags up around my room in my Work Stations. Here is a picture of them.
Here’s a close up of them.
I’ll be updating with more pictures in a little while! Enjoy your Labor Day weekend! 😉
2010-2011 LWS Progress
I’ve had the craziest two weeks I can remember at the beginning of the school year! You’re all probably experiencing or about to experience the same thing. I can’t put my finger on what it was, but all of it together had tired me out! 🙂
I’m slowly introducing Literacy Work Stations in my classroom. We haven’t officially used any of them yet (except for the library work station), but I hope to get them going later this week. I still have 3-4 more to introduce and then we’ll be ready to go.
I did add/change a few things this year and some I can show you and some I cannot not (I want to not post the names of my students on my blog), but I can take pictures of things without names and explain them in detail.
You can search for LWS on my blog and see how I managed them in the past. I’m sticking with something similar, however this year, in the interest of KISS (keeping it simple silly!), I printed all the names on pre-purchased business cards. I don’t have to write all the names out and when a new student comes in, I just print out one new card at a time. I also copied the work station labels and chart labels right from the back of Debbie Diller’s book (Literacy Work Stations). This made everything for uniform and the labels all have the names of the stations in English and Spanish! 🙂
I would stop what you’re doing right now and go hit up your Target Dollar Spot for the fabulous re-usable bags they have for sale for a dollar each (I got lucky one day and got ten of them for .50 each!!). I am using them for everything this year! I’ve purchased all I can find. They have had them out since the holiday season last year (I used them for stockings for my extended family and Easter baskets). There are always new designs. The ones now are black and white and are near the gift giving items. Anyway, buy lots of those (haven’t ripped one yet) and use them in place of baskets and buckets to stow all your goodies in! I have them in my Word Work station, Listening Station, Pocket Chart Station, Drama Station, and somewhere else I can’t think of right now! 🙂 I hang them on the wall with those 3M hooks that can be removed later and not take the paint off, but they stick almost anywhere (I haven’t ever had any fall off). You just buy refill packs of the sticky tabs when you need more. I thought I took pictures of them but I can’t find them on my camera, so I’ll take some tomorrow at school.
Overhead Work Station:
I’m introducing this one tomorrow and have been busy typing up parts of books that we have read (Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?) and printing them on transparency sheets.
I will use these on the overhead along with pictures of all my kids that I printed on transparency sheets. I printed them in black and white using iPhoto on my Mac. I will cut the pictures apart and the kids can put pictures of each other in the blank spots and read the words. I printed them using the “contact sheet” option, so there are 12 kids on a sheet.
Pocket Chart Station:
I wrote everyone’s name on a sentence strip and attached a color photo of them to the end of the strip (again using the “contact sheet” layout in iPhoto), and laminated them all. I showed the kids how to sort them by boy/girl (I wrote the boys on blue strips and the girls on pink strips) and how to sort them alphabetically.
I’ve added the props for Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and Brown Bear (you can purchase them from Lakeshore) to the dollar spot bags I got at Target and hung them on the wall using those 3M hooks. You can see pictures a few posts down of my Drama area.
Also using the dollar spot bags (I promise to take pictures of them!!), I placed a copy of Brown Bear and Chicka Chicka 123 along with their CD read-alongs in the bags. My old tape player quit working last year and all our media specialist had was a CD player (which I’m excited about!!), so I’m switching everything over to CD!! 🙂 This week, we will be reading Mouse Paint and I don’t have a CD for that, so I just made my own!! 😉 I opened Garage Band (on the Mac) and read the book slowly into the mic. I left spaces for the “turn the page sound” and added those in later. I also added subtle background music in so it would help hide the fact that it sounds like I was reading inside of a tin can! 🙂 I burned it to a CD and now we have Mouse Paint on CD for our listening station! 🙂 I might be open to adding them to my Kristen’s Kindergarten store if there is enough interest (I’ll be doing this with lots of other stories!). It was easy to do and took me about 20 minutes from the time I read to burning the CD.
I’ll get some pictures taken this week of those things and get them posted. Hope this was enough to tide you over! 😉 Today is my grandmas 91st birthday, so I’m off to bring her some birthday cheer! 🙂 Grad school starts tomorrow (8/23)…nervous!!! 🙂
I can’t believe that I didn’t do anything with Mouse Paint last year!! I came back to my blog and searched and searched sure that I had at least showed the book to the children and I couldn’t find a thing…which ended up being a good thing to get me back into “school” mode. I had to create activities that would fit into Math, Science, and Language Arts. I’ll be sharing them over the next couple of days, but I wanted to share what we did in Science today…
Our teams’ original idea was to use clear hair gel, mix in two colors of food coloring and let the kids squish the bags…no dice on the hair gel. When I went shopping to get some for everyone, the store had every color except clear!! I looked down one shelf and saw Suave Shampoo and Conditioner, coconut scented! It was cheaper too! So, 10 bottles of Suave later and some food coloring, here we are!
I placed a large “glob” of conditioner into a sandwich sized baggie and inserted that into a quart size FREEZER baggie (they are thicker!). After explaining to the children that they could choose two colors from red, yellow, and blue, I walked around and asked each child what two colors that they would like to have in their sandwich baggie. I then sealed the baggies shut and the children went to town squishing and squashing the baggies until something happened! We all made green, orange, and purple!
As a class, we then wrote about our results and tallied up what color each person came up with. I’ll post pictures, when I remember to take some! 🙂
I also purchased those water bottle ice cube trays from the Dollar Tree (2 for $1) and we made colored ice cubes. Two trays were blue, two were red, and two were yellow. In the freezer they went. Tomorrow, we will give two to each of the children and let them watch them melt. Last year I did this, and learned that it was best to fill them in the AM and they would be slightly frozen later in the day (about 3-4 hours later) and they would melt faster. They were also a little more difficult to get out of the trays. I’ll also take pictures of that! 🙂
Two pretty inexpensive Science experiments to get kids on the path to Inquiry! We’re taking baby steps now! Later in the year, full throttle! 🙂