Beacon Center for Children

We took a close look at Black Walnut fruit and were amazed at how good it smelled! Since the black walnuts have a nice texture we decided to paint with them. We rolled the fruits in the paint until we created a beautiful and intriguing black walnut tempera paint art piece!

We've been having a blast in the yard during waterplay! We created sock and water bottle bubble blowers and had lots of fun with the long strips of bubbles that blew out of the sock! We added the bubbles to our water tubs and were excited to see how the bubbles foamed up and over the tubs when we added more water with the hose. Some of us gained a bubble beard! It was a good week to be water scientists! Yahoo!

We ended last week with paint color mixing, pickle making and ribbon dancing to Chinese music! It was the best fun!

We finished last week with great fun mixing colors, pickle making and dancing to Chinese music with scarves. It was the best fun!

Come fly with us in Pre-K! We made paper airplanes and experimented with different ways of folding them. We added tape as "weights" to see if we could improve the plane's flight.

Next we shifted to hot air balloons and how they work. We did a hot air / cold air experiment with balloons and water bottles. We noticed that the hot air rose up and filled the balloon. We created our own hot air balloons and even did a hot air balloon collage after we learned about the hot air balloon festival in Arizona. We experimented with gravity and how fast different objects fall.

This led us to a discussion of the ins and outs of parachutes! We created our own "coffee filter" parachutes that we tested out from different heights. We noticed that if we attached something heavier to the parachutes they fell faster - we love being scientists! We're tired from flying to so many places! :)

Check out our Summer Newsletter, "The Beacon Beat". We're busy preparing our exciting fall programs and launching the new Brightwheel app to streamline
interactions for Beacon parents. Plus, there's a spotlight on one of our successful Beacon alumnus and see what he's up to now.

The latest news from Beacon Center! Dear Parents and Alumni Families: While our children are busy enjoying the relaxing, fun days at our summer camp, we've been very busy planning exciting new fall programs. We have also been working on launching the Brightwheel app, a tool designed for parents to streamline interactions including ...

This week in Pre-K we continued exploring color and color mixing focusing on the colors of the rainbow. The highlight of the week was the 2 different "walking rainbow science experiments"! Our children were so excited to see the colors mixing to create all the colors of the rainbow, watching the rainbows "walk" across the paper towel. They kept running back to the table to check the progress of their rainbow! We talked about scientists and what they do. We decided we are not only artists, but are also scientists!

We're learning about the ocean and its creatures. We painted an ocean mural so we can feel like we're at the beach in Cape May at Beacon Center! We found imaginary seashells and even a few sandcrabs!

Our children are so proud of the first string beans they harvested in Beacon Center's homegrown organic vegetable garden this summer. Children learn so much about how things grow and learn to enjoy healthy foods at the same time. Gardening is just one of our fun summer camp activities. Visit our website to learn more about summer camp and our fall programs.

Home - Toddler, Preschool and Pre-K Programs - Beacon Center for Children Beacon Center for Children - Philadelphia Preschool and Pre-K Programs, After School Programs and Summer Camps. Schedule a tour today!

This week the Middle Room children studied the magic of the underwater kingdom and the concept of camouflage. Throughout this month we have learned much about the different sea creatures that have the capability to camouflage themselves whether for protection from predators or while on the prowl for a meal. This week's highlight project was a multilayered "sea scene". Water colors, gems, seaweeds, fish, and other animal creatures were placed on the childrens' pieces each day. In the end, we were able to create fabulous camouflaged artworks with amazing colors and textures.

This week we continued our theme of the great outdoors in the toddler room, furthering our nature discussions. The main event of the week was our release of the class butterflies. After spending the last month watching their maturation from caterpillars, we saw our butterflies complete their metamorphosis - they were ready to leave their little shelter. Thus, we let them fly away, setting them free on our playground. It was bittersweet, but we learned a whole lot observing their life cycle. We wish them well!

In our Pre-K Classroom we have been busy studying different life cycles of insects, mammals, birds and reptiles; it only seemed natural that we relate this study to human life cycles. We read a wonderful book written by Xelena Gonzalez and Adriana Garcia called All Around Us.
It’s a lovely story about a girl and her grandfather who connect circles to family, ancestry and life cycles. It also speaks to native cultural traditions and how some celebrate new life and end of life too. We all looked around the room to find different circles in the classroom. These ranged from lids on containers and tops of water bottles to part of shoes. From there we traced circles with markers and carefully painted with watercolors to either join them or not. The children enjoyed doing all of this work entirely on their own, following multi-stepped directions, gathering different materials and artistically arranging colors. They were incredibly focused!