In my previous post, I shared with you how to make sugar glass but be sure to remember that making sugar glass is not a process that can be made by the children or with the children. Â But for those of you who like to try new things and have the time to make up a batch of sugar glass, then this post is for you. Â Our pre-k only class participated in exploring and creating with sugar glass…
Before the children explored the sugar glass, we talked about real glass and introduced or reviewed words like breakable, fragile, see-through and so on. We looked for real glass items in our classroom like the windows and talked about how real glass is fragile and should it break, we never ever want to step on it or pick it up. And we talked about how real glass can be melted, molded, and even recycled…
Then we introduced the sugar glass to the children. We had some sugar glass on a tray in the shapes of letters and pieces for the children to touch and explore. The children noticed that the sugar glass was a little bit sticky (since it had been out overnight). We didn’t try to fool the children into thinking that our panes of sugar glass were pieces of real glass. We wanted the children to know the difference between real glass and sugar glass…
The children then moved to the table where each child had their own sheet of sugar glass to explore…
The children were invited to take their pane of sugar glass out of the pan and lift it up so they could hold it, feel it, and look through it…
The children were invited to see if they could crack the sugar glass but it was too hard to crack with our hands. So the children took turns using a hammer to gently crack their sugar glass into small pieces…
And yes, the process of cracking that sugar glass with a hammer was super fun and intriguing…
After each child broke their sugar glass into small pieces, they began to take the pieces out of the pans and put them into a larger pan we had in the middle of the table…
The children continued adding the sugar glass to our tub until all the sugar glass was in the tub and our cookie pans were empty…
Next, we added a puddle of glue to each child’s empty pan and the children tilted their pans back and forth until the glue covered the entire bottom of their pans…
Now it was time to select their favorite colors and pieces of sugar glass to make their own sugar glass designs in the glue…
The sugar glass designs were beautiful and fun to create…
Every child’s sugar glass design was unique and when they were finished, we set them aside to dry for several days…
During the drying phase, the sugar glass began melting into the glue rather than staying hard so our glue and sugar glass created a stained glass effect but it took a very long time for it all to dry and in the end, we had to send the sugar glass glue mosaics home in the pans…
We had lots of left-over sugar glass, so we added water to the sugar glass tub so the children could explore the sugar glass a new way. Â The water began to dissolve the sugar glass in the tub…
And much of the sugar glass stuck together and needed tweezers to separate it. And, of course, it was all sticky to the touch…
After the sugar glass completely dissolved into our water tub, we were able to simply pour it all down the sink while running hot water to keep it going down without building up in the sink…
We used our sugar glass explorations to talk about the sound of the letter Gg and then to introduce the concept of stained glass which I will share with you very soon as well…
PS. My students did not ask to eat the sugar glass but although sugar glass is made of sugar, it is incredible difficult to eat and will get all stuck to your teeth so the answer would have been that this glass is simply for us to explore. Â But again, no one asked or tried to eat it – they were too busy exploring.
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