All About Me: Coat

We are studying “All About Me” and this week, we are focusing on the clothes we wear. Here are our daily topics for the week: Shirt, Pants, Underwear, Hat, Coat, Socks and Shoes. Let me tell you a bit about what we did on “coat” day!

If you are going to learn about coats for a day, you should definitely check out the book “Goat’s Coat”! Here is an excerpt:

“Let me tell you the tale of Alfonzo the goat, who was terribly proud of his lovely new coat. Alfonzo was happy; he pranced and he skipped. Then he heard a sad noise, croaking out of a ditch.”

In this book, Alfonzo the goat gives away little pieces of his brand new coat to creatures in need throughout the story. The whole book rhymes and is absolutely ADORABLE! Warning, you will want to buy this book after reading it https://youtu.be/qi8nj_qDipw

We have been LOVING Experience Early Learning‘s daily STEAM station ideas! Today’s lesson plan was to see if we could design a sturdy coat hanger but we were inspired by the study of our own coats to see if we could design a “good” coat and “bad” coat. Here’s how to do this steam station:

Fill two socks with rice.
Microwave for a minute or two
Rubber band them closed
Stick a thermometer inside
Set out materials for your kids to design a “good” coat (a coat that keeps the sock warm the longest) and a “bad” coat (a coat that doesn’t keep the sock warm).

Material ideas:

paper
aluminum foil
various types of fabrics
cotton balls
plastic wrap
paper

Have your students check on the temperatures periodically to see if their “good” insulating coat is keeping their sock warmer than the bad coat.

For writing, we wrote in pretend snow. You could use anything white–flour, powdered sugar, cornstarch…

Experience Early Learning provided us with the opportunity to learn that some animals have a built in coat (their fur) to keep them warm! They included an animal fur matching game in our daily bag.

For art, Experience Early Learning had the kids make their own animal fur. They included tan cardstock, brown cardstock, and black dots to make cheetah fur but you could have had your student make any kind of animal fur their could think of (even an imaginary animal coat).

That was it for today! If you want to read more about what we have done during our unit click here. If you are interested in learning more about Experience Early Learning thematic units, click here.