A glimpse of our last day of playgroup for this session:

Clay - Adding water to our gathering activity made the clay slick and changed how we used it.

Water Wall - We enjoyed scooping and pouring water and watching the many ways we could move water through the containers.

Water Table and Bins - We also explored what objects could do at the water table, and we scrubbed some of the tools we had used with clay earlier in the session.

The Mattie Miracle Walk & Family Festival was a wonderful event to be a part of. It was a day full of fun all to support the Mattie Miracle Cancer Foundation. There were bands, Lego displays, a climbing wall, moon bounce and much more. UpCycle was there providing the opportunity to freely create with found materials. Many spent quite a long time experimenting with the materials to create a masterpiece. 

UpCycle also provided the challenge of creating a marble run. The water wall from Earth Day was converted into a marble run since water was not available at this venue. Folks were challenged to arrange the tubes and funnels in such a way that a marble could successfully travel from the top to the bottom of the wall without getting out.    

Thank you, Vicki, for having UpCycle at such a wonderful event. 

You may have noticed that we have offered the same activities each meeting, but we make changes or add things based on our observations of your children and their work.  Having the same, but slightly different, activities provides a comfort level for children.  They walk in familiar with a medium or material and with confidence that, I can do this.  The changes also engage children in new ways, which extends their experiences.

We have opened with clay each week, starting with a large hunk, and then added implements and changed the presentation to balls and slabs.  We had one friend who was reluctant to touch the clay.  Having tools and other found objects has encouraged everyone to get involved.  Many children seemed to be interested in filling their slabs with objects and some took delight in seeing the imprints that the objects could make.

Our workshop has been a place where children have built tall and tested the balls and tubes.  We also noticed how much children have enjoyed the tape.  We decided to combine the tape and tubes to see if children would be interested in using the tape as a tool to create tube pathways for the balls.  A few friends explored the tubes on the walls with balls and some put other tubes inside the taped tubes.  Moving the tape to the other side of the room where there are windows and ledges brought new ideas about how to use it.