Martian Mania!

This week the preschool class learned about aliens and began to explore their own conceptions of what aliens are, what they look like, and how they communicate. Mallory and Kelsey taught the lesson while Bre documented. Students made alien contour drawings using overhead projectors and small household objects. Students also began making their alien thinking caps out of tissue paper, which allow them to talk to their aliens.
We had a tough time this week for many reasons. One of them was that we changed the order of the lesson by reading the story to the class at snack time instead of after sketchbooks. This seemed to create confusion among the kids who were always anxious about what we were going to do next. We also could have drawn out the demos a little more to enhance student understanding.
One thing that went wrong with the alien contour drawings was that I put too many objects in the baskets for the students to use. They ended up just covering the entire projector screen with stuff and it was difficult to get them back on track. I should have limited the amount of objects to 10 or less for the students to arrange instead. The video below shows one group as they draw the outline of their alien.



A problem we continue to have each week with our projects is that whenever we make anything where the students might get messy, they completely loose interest and just want to get clean again. They HATE getting messy. How can we handle this while still doing fun and engaging projects? These projects also seem to demand a lot of our attention as we have to help the students construct their pieces. With 21 students, that leaves 7 students to help for each instructor and we find that there are just too many kids and too little teachers to help them properly. Any suggestions?
Despite having over 30 minutes left over at the end of the lesson, Mallory and Kelsey really pulled it together. The alien shadow play demonstration went really well and the students got really excited! Mallory and Kelsey also improvised with the 30 minutes we had left and had the students color in their alien contours. The students really enjoyed the activity. We also had them test out flying their rocket ships in the shadow screen. Overall, we worked it out just fine and we are at a place where we can reflect upon what went wrong and improve upon it next week.