Welcome to the After Party! Each week after the weekly blog featuring activities in the elementary department is posted, our sensory cart is parked in the media center where it is available for check out by the rest of the school.
This post has photos of our middle and high school students enjoying the books and cart during the month of February.
So we are actually starting this month with a little throw back—-Gasparilla pictures we accidentally left out of the January After Party!
The students had such fun with our crackling sea foam—–AKA pop rocks and shaving foam 🙂
They searched for doubloons in the “Spanish Rice”…….
and made crossbones in the kinetic sand—–true Gasparilla pirates!
Ok, now back to February where we started the month taking a little trip to China!
Our vibrating massager and jet sounds recorded on a voice output device made you feel like you were on a real plane.
The students had fun finding different “Chinese” objects in a box of bright red paper shred. They used star shaped cookie cutters to cut out yellow play dough stars—–like the ones on the Chinese flag.
                     The funnel in our “ocean” basin proved to be a big hit.
The teachers had a lot of fun exploring the boxes also!
They really are lots of fun 🙂
We finished with some bubble wrap firecrackers—–Happy Chinese New Year!!!!!
For Valentines Day we chose a tale from Shakespeare——a Midsummer Nights Dream.
Since the story is a love story, we had a box with pink, red, and LOTS of hearts!
                      There were also letters to spell the word L O V E.
We had colorful glittery, fairy dust discovery bottles. Everyone loves watching the glitter swirl around.
The students had fun draping the different translucent fabrics over their faces and using “fairy vision” 🙂
There were lots of fairies and woodland creatures to discover in this box.
Our moonlit woods umbrella was a big hit—–the students loved it.
                                   It was pretty magical!
The students learned about different countries on the continent of Africa with this next theme.
They learned that red, yellow, and green are popular colors found on many different flags. The students sorted pompoms in those colors.
The Maasai tribe were colorful beads, like the ones in this box that are also the colors of the Kenyan flag.
Egypt is another country in Africa. It is famous for it’s ancient pyramids—–a lot bigger than the miniature ones in the desert sand box. The students also discovered some crocodiles in our  Nile River water basin.
The students had a lot of fun looking for animals in the Tanzania safari box and letter “A”s in a  box of coffee beans (first discovered in Ethiopia).
                                     Fun and learning!
The students loved our Rwandan gorilla—-complete with authentic sounds on a voice output device.
It was a huge hit—–literally 🙂
Our unit on Color finished out the month. Each of our boxes was a different color which made them very eye catching.
The ORANGE box was filled some fun and fascinating objects.
                               Lots of things to discover!
The BLUE box was also filled with lots of different textures to explore.
PURPLE slime was a huge hit!
                                    Truly fascinating stuff!
Hands were rinsed in our “magic” water—–we used color changing tablets so each class had a different color.
The twinkling lights in our GREEN light box were very popular!
As with the other colors, the students used communication symbols to identify the color they were exploring.
Our RED plush ladybug vibrated when squeezed—–
                                 how fun is that 🙂
We finished with some WHITE lotion!
Thanks for checking out the After Party, we will see you in a month with more fun and learning——-Group by Group!