wild action / super spirals
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
When we were watching a snake from Wild Action crawl back into its bag, the children noticed how it curled itself around and around. After a bit of discussion they decided he had made a spiral shape. As a large group we held hands in a line and made a spiral with our bodies. As we had had a think about where we find spirals in nature, the children were aware that snails have a spiral shell, so we sang this little song as we went around -
“Snail, snail, snail, snail, goes around and round and round.”
We gave the children the opportunity to create their own spirals as a precursor to a science activity we will be doing soon.
It is a lot of cutting which needs to be fairly exact and we were excited at how well they did.
They were very pleased with the end results.
We brought in a big basket of apples and the apple peeler/slicer which most schools seem to have in their classrooms, or are available for about $25 in shops like “House”.
The machine peels off the skin …
… slices the apple into a spiral and decores it.
Besides the obvious gross motor activity, what a lot of maths language we heard – put the apple on, wind it forwards/backwards, it’s cutting around, is it finished, look at the spiral peel/apple …
A wonderful by product of this discovery of spirals is that the children start seeing them all around them …
… eg; a shell which is at the play dough table …
… having fun with magnetic play …
… in the finger paint …
… and how you can make beautiful spirals in slime!
