February is National Bird-Feeding Month. 

The preschool students celebrated the event by making strings of bird food to make sure the birds had some good food during the colder winter months.

The students used their fine motor skills to thread Cheerios cereal onto pieces of string. Then we tied the two ends of the string together to make a loop like a bracelet or necklace. We took our bird food strings outside to hang them in trees outside the classroom.

During our Construction week theme, we copper-plated a nail using lemon juice and salt and pennies. I first saw this experiment from Quirky Momma blog.

We poured about 1/4 cup of lemon juice in a plastic cup. Then we add a little salt to the juice. We added about 20 pennies to the juice. We rubbed about an inch of the nail starting with the pointy end with steel wool. Then we stood the nail up with the pointy end down in the juice. We let it sit for about an hour but it didn’t take a full hour for the experiment to work. The end of the nail down in the juice started looking like copper, like the pennies.

Here is why the nail became copper plated: (according to the Quirky Momma blog site referenced above) The copper from the pennies dissolves a bit in the lemon juice, which produces copper ions.  When you put your nail into the lemon juice (acid), the copper ions are attracted to the iron in the nail and build up over the hour, layer by layer. 

This is a simple art project for Groundhog Day (February 2). The preschool students can color the picture of the groundhog and cut it out. This gives the student creativity on color choice and scissor cutting practice.

Then cut a slit in the top third section of a sheet of black or brown construction paper. The student can slip his groundhog picture through the slit and pretend that the groundhog is peeking up through his hole in the ground to look for his shadow on February 2.

Watch this live broadcast of the Groundhog Day celebration in Pennsylvania.

The preschool students made a construction worker puppet in class during our Construction Zone theme week. Each piece of the puppet was from a pattern. The teacher traced each piece and some students cut the pieces out; however, the teacher had to help some of the younger students manage the scissors in cutting out their pieces.

Then the students put the puppet together like a puzzle.

During construction week in the preschool classroom, the students learned and experienced what a pulley is. We tied a string around the handle of the tool box. (That was the best thing with the sturdiest handle we had to use but you could also use a sturdy bucket with a handle.)

We put the box on the other side of our half wall with the string hanging over on our side of the wall. The students worked and pulled until the box came up to the top of the wall for them to reach it.

As we begin our many theme weeks on Community Helpers in the preschool classroom, we started with Construction workers. The students love the construction zone. We have been reading books about construction sites and trucks. We have been talking about tools and how to use tools safely.

The students have plastic play tools for play time, but they actually got to experience real tools. With teacher supervision, they did very well and enjoyed using a real hammer and nails.