Milestones

Who Wants Lemonade?!

In true Reggio fashion, the teacher learned and discovered along with the children this week! I have made lemonade with real lemons with many, many children, but never quite so young. Some of your children DID NOT want to get STICKY, others are still developing the hand strength to squeeze a lemon, which challenged me to find some new ways to do this (see below!). But nothing shocked me more with our sweet group than their sheer ability to be able to drink 1 whole lemon's sour, sour juice STRAIGHT with no sugar added! Those are some fresh taste buds!

I sliced the lemons in a variety of ways to help the children squeeze them (slices, quarters, halves. . .)

We also figured out if we roughed up the lemons a little bit before squeezing them they might be easier to squeeze (Jill learned this from shows on the Food Network).

We eventually, actually, tried stepping on the lemons to get juice out - this worked for the kids who did not what to get sticky! And in all humility, the process we went through and figuring things out is such a great exercise for the children - it mirrors many real-life processes involved in science and everyday scenarios where people have to solve a problem.

We used a flour sifter to strain the seeds . . .

Squeezing all those lemons is A LOT of work!

After reading the Pinkalicious book about her pink lemonade, we decided to add raspberries to our lemonade!

We smooshed the raspberries in ziplocks using a block.

This is how much some of our effort yielded.

Zoe did a great job painting our sign!

Then came the mixing and tasting . . .

and making it pink!

We were SO excited to SELL our lemonade! Some of us wanted to run up and down the hall and check to see if our moms and nannys and grand parents were coming around the corner and looking thirsty! Dave in the church office bought several cups.

We sold the lemonade for 1 cent per cup, so I had the children investigate all sorts of coin money so they could begin to identify pennies.

Our many lemons (thank you parents for bringing them in!) yielded lots of seeds so we decided to try to plant them.

Finally, customers!

You all should be so proud, as this week's activity represents the children's ability to partake in a process throughout several days, connecting the meaning and being excited about the outcome. They were very authentically invested. They did a real thing - made yummy lemonade - with 2 fruits! They made decisions, worked together, solved problems and overcame things they thought they didn't want to do (get sticky). Good job, Milestones Inaugural Class of 2012.

A supplemental, but related, activity we engages in was taking a sugar cube and seeing how long it took for us to stir it until it dissolved, or disappeared. The children really enjoyed this, so we kept adding sugar cubes and found that it took longer and longer for the sugar to dissolve, creating a solution. We had done a little of this earlier in the year, but this time it was more relevant, knowing that we might have to add sugar to our lemonade.

This activity was very successful in that it was very engaging to the children, they asked a lot of questions and they did it for a long time! (who says 3 and 4 year olds have short attention spans?)