Tumble Mat

            Over the course of last semester and this semester, the children have been working on their bodies and how to balance them.  This is very important at their age because they are gaining a lot of body awareness and learning that they have control over how their bodies move.  We wanted to offer the children multiple opportunities to explore that this term as it if something they are still very curious about.

            Last time, the children had the opportunity to walk on the balance beam.  This was a good way to see how their strategies would chance depending on how comfortable they were on the beam and with their own body movements.  We saw a range of strategies used by the children.

            To continue this with the children, we brought a tumble mat into the classroom.  This gave the children the opportunity to practice their balancing in a different way.  We first looked at videos of gymnasts performing floor routines and talked about how they were moving their bodies. 

            The children loved this and began to try some different ways of manipulating their own bodies.  We saw some of the yoga poses that the children had worked on last semester incorporated with some new moves that might have been inspired by the gymnastics we were talking about.

            Throughout this experience we were able to see lots of new ways of moving on the part of the children and they were able to watch and each other and challenge each other.  We are going to bring in the shadow screen next week so the children can watch their bodies and the bodies of the other children as they move about.

Balance of Weight

            The children have been using the wind tunnel that we created with the fan and clear plastic lamination.  Previously, the children were using pieces of Styrofoam to see how they would respond if the sizes of the pieces were different.  The children noticed that the smaller pieces flew higher than the larger pieces did.

            We wanted to offer the children a new material to try in the wind tunnel.  I chose Tin Foil because I wanted a material that could be manipulated easier and something that the children could have more control over as they used it with the fan.

            We started off by using large flat pieces of foil and we talked about it as a group.  We looked at what happened when large pieces were put into the fan and the children tried to base their predictions off of their previous experience with Styrofoam and feathers.  They were really surprised when they saw the long flat piece of foil fly up.

            After that we explored the foil in small groups.  The children at first used the large flat pieces and were commenting on how the foil flew up.  Once they began using it more, the foil became crinkled and smaller.   A few of the children noticed a change in the height of the foil as it flew.  I’m not sure if they made the connection between the change in the shape of the foil and the flying, but they noticed that some pieces did not fly as high as other pieces.

            We are going to look at foil in different shapes next week to see if the children make those connections with how the foil flies.  I want to see if the children really do make those connections between the shape of the foil and the flight patterns of the foil in a specific shape.