We are a little late in celebrating Dutch-American Heritage Day (it was November 16) but we still had a lot of fun learning about the Netherlands this week! Our sensory group explored boxes related to facts about the country. Our fine motor groups made art projects of Dutch symbols and the language group made a traditional snack!
If you took a trip to the Netherlands you would need to fly in an airplane! We recorded the sounds of a jet plane taking off on our voice output device and used a vibrating tube to simulate the feeling of being on an airplane.
The vibrating tube was a real hit with the students!
The Dutch use orange as their symbolic color so we used orange paper shred as the base for this box. There were some little bicycles—it is the world biking capitol of the world—and an authentic wooden shoe! A hand held fan made a pretty good windmill stand in. We also included some felt cheese slices, play people, oranges, and the word “home”.
The dried pasta made noise when shaken or moved which added to the fun!
There was a picture of the flag to find at the bottom of our rice box. We included 2 different sized spoons for scooping practice.
It was great for promoting bilateral coordination and the students had so much fun with it!
As a reminder of the Netherlands beautiful flowers, we used “plumeria” from Bath and BodyWorks for our scent this week. The students used the picture symbols “like” and “don’t like” to communicate their opinion on the scent—–it was a hit with most of them!
FINE MOTOR GROUP
We loved the pictures of the colorful wooden shoes we found on the internet. So on Tuesday the students stamped some colorful shoe pictures of their own. We used this: wooden-shoe-template
Identify objects by one observable property, such as color, is a science access point.
The math access point recognize a movement that reflects a spatial relationship, such as up and down is addressed here. Recognize similarities and differences is size of common objects is also addressed.
Recognize objects with two-dimensional shapes is a math access point.
On Wednesday the students made wind mills! We used this: windmill-template
The math access point recognize objects with two-dimensional shapes is again addressed.
Track the movement of objects that are pushed or pulled is a science access point.
This week in our language group we made a traditional Dutch recipe called stamppot. Because this is a mashed potatoes dish, all of the vegetables used had to be cut up and boiled the night before.
Our students started out by putting the potatoes (3 had been boiled) into a bowl. Our students had to indicate that there were MORE potatoes after a measuring cup had been filled once and there were some more potatoes left over.
Our students then put the carrots (4 had been peeled and cut up) into the same bowl. We talked about the color ORANGE. Boiled carrots have such a vivid color!
Hope you enjoyed learning a little about the the Netherlands this week, we sure did! Join us again next time for more fun and learning——-Group by Group!