Imagination!

We jumped back into measurement in math. After measuring in frogs how far we could jump, children moved around the room by themselves or with a friend, finding things to measure with hands.

One center this morning was painting x-rays (our letter this week is X). We didn't have real models to look at, we just used our imaginations of what bones might look like. There were lots of hands and legs painted, most human.Also, with the Xx theme, we read Not a Box. I love this book! The pictures and text are so simple but it is a fun, imaginative story.Then in our journals we started with a small 'box' and wrote: "It is not a box. It is...."
rocket!
It can be anything:
a carriage (she wrote NOT bigger because it was supposed to be louder)
car (some children opted to draw their starting box, rather than gluing one in)
Then came the most exciting part - playing with boxes! Over Spring Break someone asked me if I needed any boxes. Need? No. Want? YES! Of course most children wanted to sit in them, so it started as a few cars that got joined into a train. They learned that 2 people sitting in a box breaks it, so that one turned into the railroad track.
There was a break from boxes when someone announced they were having drawing club. They found the book of How to Draw Farm Animals and started to teach some friends how to draw some animals. It was really cute.
Back to the boxes: "it's a costume"
boats...
a house
a more complicated shelter that fell down, so they had to work together to figure out how to make it stay.
As soon as it was time to clean up I had children asking, "Can we play with the boxes tomorrow?"

Did you know that the cardboard was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2005?