loose parts

Creating sensory bags in babies’ class

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Babies enjoy playing with small pasta pieces, at the sensory table. However, they thought that the light yellow color of the pasta is a little dull and wanted to change it. But the question was, “how”?

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First, we picked our favorite liquid color and dropped it into little bags, together with the pasta pieces. To have a big success, we dropped a looooot of color!

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Then, we shook the bags. Babies observed that pasta pieces soon started to disappear! Babies tried then to identify the new content of the bags, by using all their senses.

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The colorful pasta bags were magically transformed into our new “sensory bags”! A new toy that we added in our class play equipment.

A toy, made by babies themselves!

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(by Maria Gryllaki, teacher in babies’ class in Athens)

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Looking deeper

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Drawing with cars is not just a fun activity for babies.

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Looking deeper,  someone realizes that through this activity babies interact one another, gain socialization skills, taste the car, throw it down to listen to the sound, and more….

We teachers, the only think to do is to observe all these different behaviors.

Just by evaluating children’ reaction in any activity, we learn so many thinks.

(by Anastasia Kouroubali, teacher in babies class, in Athens)

International Fairy Tea Party 2016

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We spent the whole week preparing our fairy tea party which took place on Thursday and Friday in the woods. After reading in school the legend of the rainbow fairies, we decided to help these little fairies make a rainbow.

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In school, we put on the wings we made out of hangers and rope and practiced how to use the fairy dust and learnt a few spells! We mixed paints, just to find out that we only need three colors to make so many more.

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We even tried to make our colors shine by sprinkling some fairy dust on them.

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The result was to make everything around us shine bright, including ourselves!

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On Thursday and Friday, we had a wonderful day in the woods!

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We looked around for some fairy signs and while looking we found some acorns instead and a little tortoise wandering around.

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We built our fairy welcome houses in the trees and decorated them the way we wanted.

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Then, we went hunting for colors.

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And used what we found to make a rainbow.

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And after all this hard work, we set the table and had a cup of tea and biscuits!

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(by Claire Hadjinikolaou, English teacher in Dorothy Snot, Athens)

A wonderful journey for pre-K class triggered by a visit to a Greek living art legend

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Yesterday Sunday July 3, it was the summer party day for toddlers, post-toddlers and pre-K class. Our parties are always free play sessions, based in stimuli and projects children have been engaged the past months.

Pre-K class had the unique chance this year to visit one of the last living Greek art legends, the sculptor Mrs. Natalia Mela. It was such a moving experience for everybody!

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After that, whole class entered into a fantastic journey in sculpturing by utilizing real life items, exactly like Mrs. Mela has been doing in her life!

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By the use of everyday loose parts and other elements, our children created in class a number of fantastic artworks…

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…and enjoyed a wonderful 3-month project.

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So, it was normal to include this experience in summer party and connect their play to the sculpturing project. They worked in couples: one was the sculptor and the other was the sculpture! See the video:

Τhis is what life-derived learning is all about: Encouraging children to master unique lifetime experiences and then allowing them to build their own worlds.

2016 pre-Ks developed a strong love-for-sculpturing DNA, for life….