Orange Week

This week we focused on the color orange. We did lots of fun things this week too! The first thing we did was add orange to our Hermit Crab shells in the orange form. The sea anemones were orange and we made these with green and orange pipe cleaners. We counted out 5 orange pipe cleaners and tied them with 1 green one. Once those were secure we twisted the orange halves with our little fingers. This was really good practice following instructions and improving listening skills.

This picture of the number two was from our orange color hunt. It was my favorite of this weeks kids pics.

At my school we don't "teach" Halloween specifically but we do talk about pumpkins because they are orange. This week we did several pumpkin activities and once was carving a pumpkin and describing the different textures of the pumpkin. After we were done examining the pumpkin we filled it with dirt and some of the seeds to see if we could start a new pumpkin plant, a great activity I found from another blog called Growing in Pre-K.

I did some more research on pumpkin activities and saw a counting book, The 5 Little Pumpkins. It was great but it did talk about Halloween so I changed it into a pumpkin counting activity. Students were given sheets that had pumpkins grouped from 1-5. They had to cut, count and glue these onto a paper. Then write the number next to the group of pumpkins. The other picture is of our life cycle of a pumpkin. We sequenced the the stages after reading the book, Pumpkin, Pumpkin. 

This week for our 5 senses activity we examined an orange, how it looked, tasted, smelled, felt and sounded. Lots of our 5 senses activities don't make noise thankfully. We always save tasting for last and this time we all made faces with our orange slices.

Another activity we did was mixing colors! Finally, I had waited for this day for weeks. I wanted students to see that in a food coloring box we only have green, blue, red and yellow. Well this week when we made our "lava lamp" (colored water and oil mixture, an experiment we did during green week) that we didn't have an orange food coloring. They suggested I go buy orange food coloring but I told them I couldn't get it from grocery store but I may be able to find it from cake making store. I told them we could mix the colors, so we used Mrs. McCoy's magic color mixing machine which was two funnels, 1/2 inch pvc pipes, joints and plastic cups.

They loved it and were great little scientist.