Learning Together

The children are forming some wonderful bonds with one another that make learning together and learning from one another come naturally! 

As the children become more comfortable with their surroundings, teachers, and classmates, they are clearly becoming more confident, speaking their minds, asking their questions, and helping one another. We’ve been talking a lot about Carol McCloud’s “filling buckets” --that is, doing kind things to help make others feel good--and the children are really taking it to heart! This week, they each picked a name from our classroom bucket and helped me write something good about each person. Take a look at some of their comments!

• Chaendra is good at playing in the sand! (Eliah)

• Evan is good at puzzles! (Maeve)

• Sean is a good friend, because he helps clean up sand and Lincoln Logs. (Elsie)

• I like Silas, because he caught the puzzle fish with me! (Kyle)

• Ololara is a good artist! (Lorelai)

• Hudson is fun to play with outside. He is always nice to me, and I like to see him! (Ololara)

Come visit the classroom or our blog for a complete list of the children’s compliments to one another!

A First Dive Into Literacy

We have become very active in our play with words and sounds in the last couple of weeks. That’s because before we put a significant focus on written letters, it is essential to develop children’s phonemic awareness: the understanding that language is made of individual sounds and the ability to manipulate them. To focus on this, we’ve been reading a lot of rhyming stories where the children can fill in the rhymes, such as in Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham and McClintock’s A Fly Went By. We solve rhyming riddles that lead children to contribute to a class drawing.We’ve also been singing songs in which we say each individual sound in the children’s names to see if we can blend them together to guess who’s turn is next. It is tremendously helpful to your child if you continue this play at home. Some great ways to do this at home is with nursery rhymes and sound manipulation games where certain sounds in a word are changed (such as in “I Like To Eat, Eat, Eat Apples and Bananas” or “Hudson, Hudson, Bo Budson, Banana Fanna Fo Fudson...”). Not only do these help children to hear and isolate the sounds in words, but it also teaches them how fun playing with language can be--an important part to a great literacy beginning!

Beginning Number Concepts

Counting and graphing have been key components to every morning in preschool! One way that we exercise this is with our question of the day. It’s asked in a survey format, and each child answers by writing their name or their first letter in the column that represents their answer. As a group, we tally up all the answers, put them in a graph, and then the children use that visual representation to discuss which answer was chosen the most often and the least often. 

Our Class Tree

As part of our science studies, we have adopted a class tree! The children are learning all about and identifying the parts of a tree. On Friday, the children all went outside with some paper, pencils, and clipboards to sketch the tree just outside our classroom window. This week, we’ll be tracing and painting the sketches. Throughout the year, we’ll continue making observations and drawing our findings to see how our tree will change in different seasons.