From Christmas Trees and Snowflakes to Shapes and Colors

One day Lily wanted to draw a Christmas tree. She started drawing and said, "I can't do it!"

We talked about the shapes we see in a Christmas Tree. We got a new piece of paper and started to draw the shapes we talked about.

And right before our eyes.............Lily made a BEAUTIFUL TREE!!!! One by one, the children started admiring her work. Soon, half of the class was making trees with her. We cut them out and put them on one big piece of paper to make a "Christmas Tree Forest!"

Ella and Natalie wanted to make two "giant" Christmas trees, so they drew them and then wanted to paint them. Only.....we had one little problem! There was no green paint!!!

This was the perfect opportunity for some problem solving! "How can we make green paint?", we asked. The girls started suggesting mixing different colors together. We made charts to record our "tests"........

And in the end, we found out that yellow + blue = green! You can see by our charts that we learned several other color combinations........

So the girls started painting away...








They painted the tree green, and started making plans to decorate the trees. The topic of snowflakes came up, and the children started talking. Some of the kids said they couldn't make snowflakes, so the teachers provided the children with this picture.....

We had the children look at and discuss what they saw. The children said:

• There are lines
• There are spikey things
• I see stars
• There are hexagons

The comment about the hexagon opened up the door for a whole new direction in our project - SHAPES!!!

We showed the children a page full of shapes and we started to name the shapes. We found the hexagon and counted the sides. We started to focus on hexagons, octagons, and pentagons. The children drew the shapes and wrote the numbers on the sides of the shapes. (This was good practice in writing our numbers, we spent extra time writing our numbers if we had trouble with them).

In order to incorporate the shapes in the Christmas Trees, we had the girls make ornaments out of the different shapes...

So far, they have made circles.....

Squares..............
Hexagons..............

and Triangles......

The rest of the children wanted to make snowflakes like the ones in the picture. The teachers gave the children pictures of hexagons, pentagons, and octagons. They counted the sides and then talked about what shape they had. We wrote the numbers on the sides of the shapes. The teachers put the words, "hexagon", "pentagon", and "octagon" in front of the children. We asked them to pick the word of the shape they had. The children said the word, and we talked about what sound we heard first as we said the word. They figured out what letter made the first sound of the word and then were able to choose the correct word to copy on their paper.

Once the children picked the shape of their snowflake, they used popsicle sticks to create them. We are making snowflakes with octagons, hexagons, squares, diamonds, triangles, and pentagons!

We are even getting to use very special paint to decorate our snowflakes! ;0)

Florescent paint is making our snowflakes look "super cool"!!!!!

Stay tuned for more on this project!