October Grandview Program and Art Co-op

Wednesday we headed out to Grandview for our monthly hands on science program and art co-op.  Each of the science programs include a short program, hands on activity, and a coordinating lapbook to take home and complete.  The art co-op is focusing on a different artist every month and a project to create something similar to what the artist created.

This month's science program was the last one in our animal classification series.  So far we had done mammals, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and insects, and yesterday we did fish.  There were 32 children at the morning program.  In the program the children learned some different facts about fish such as where they live, how they breathe, what their body was made up of, what they eat, how their babies are born, and more.  They also learned about the different types of fish mouths and the different things fish with different mouths eat.

Then we did two different activities.  Children older than K got to fashion a fish.  They could either draw a fish and its habitat on paper, or they could use things like clothespins, paper towel rolls, pipe cleaners, puffy balls, wooden shapes, popsicle sticks, tape, and more to create their own fish.  There was some very creative fish making going on!!  I was so impressed with how different children created completely different fish, and I was blown away by one young man's fish drawing!

Younger children did a fish counting game and then made their own fish by gluing different scraps of colored paper onto a fish.

Then anyone who wanted to could make a fishing game by tracing a fish shape onto foam and poking a metal brad in as an eye.  We hot glued pipe cleaners to a magnet and taped the pipe cleaner to a wooden skewer to make a fishing pole.  Then they could catch fish with their pole.

We had 16 children stay for the art class in the afternoon.  Our artist this month was Georges Seurat.  We made a notebook page on Georges and then each child did a painting using pointillism.  To do this, they drew any picture they wanted on a piece of paper.  Each child was given a palette with several paint colors in it and a q-tip for each color.  They filled in their drawings by making dots with their q-tips on the paper.  I have to say I was very impressed with the children's drawings and paintings!

Here are my children's paintings.  I took that photo with my phone and it didn't turn out great.

Christian did the top left.  It is a painting of a well.  Emmie's is the next one, random pink, purple, and white dots.  Anthony's is the watermelon in the garden and Lily did two flowers.

We had a great day!