December 2011 Archives

11:30-12:30 Teacher Preparation of Environment and Discussion

12:30-1:10 Children's Arrival and Outdoor Play on the Playground
As children arrive at school they are greeted by a teacher and accompanied to the playground. Children are encouraged to freely explore the playground and participate in group activities, such as sledding and games. The outdoor environment is intentionally set up to incorporate the children's play preferences while providing motor challenges.

1:10-1:35 Transition to the Classroom and Discovery Time
Returning from outside, the children put their belongings away and wash their hands. The children are then able to freely explore the front half of the classroom, which includes the art center, sensory table, science center, library, writing center, dramatic play, caves, clay, and manipulatives.

1:35-1:50 Large Group
The whole class comes together to share music, movement, literature, and puppets. We will also discuss any new information pertaining to classroom interests, activities, or projects.

1:50-2:35 Activity Time and Clean Up
Children are free to play in the learning centers throughout the room, engage in specific activities, and interact with peers. Teachers observe, facilitate, and support children's play and development during this time.

2:35-2:50 Handwashing and Whole Group Snack
Children talk with each other and with teachers while enjoying a small snack. Teachers will take notice of interests, and will also facilitate conversations about current topics/themes and upcoming events.

2:50-3:05 Gym Time/Large Motor Time
Children participate in both self- and teacher-directed activities that challenge their muscle strength, balance, coordination, and risk taking abilities.

3:05-3:15 End of Day Prep
Children will assemble their belongings and get ready to leave for the day.

3:15-3:30 Pick-up and End of Day Story Reading
Children will assemble in the hallway just outside the classroom to read stories and sing songs until parents/families arrive. Children will be brought to their cars for departure.

3:30-5:00 Teacher Clean Up and Discussion

Overview: As the children return to the classroom after the break, several familiar items remain available. These items, including the dramatic play "kitchen" as well as the Lego cave, and familiar art materials encourage children to revisit the rich play that they began last session. Additionally, some new items have been included in the classroom to encourage new exploration and creative thinking. The children can explore marbles and ramps in the nook area and experiment with building different structures to move the marbles. Additionally, the science area contains magnifier, prisms, mirrors, and kaleidoscopes to encourage exploration with the sense of sight. In addition to continuing to build community in the classroom, we will also begin introducing a variety of academic concepts throughout the classroom and during large group activities throughout the session.

Dramatic Play
•Materials: housekeeping materials (furniture, dishes, food), dress-up fabric and shoes; the caves are set as bedrooms with "beds," baby dolls, and baby-care items such as diapers and baby powder, stuffed animals and animal care items (leashes, food dishes, brushes, etc)
•Rationale: to allow for the expression of family life and to encourage social interaction while playing with familiar props. To support the extended, cooperative play as children work together to sustain a pretend play session. Extend complex "care-taking" play into the care of familiar pets.
•Skills: creative role-play, peer interaction, social problem solving, and symbolic representation

Blocks

•Materials: large hollow blocks, small multi-shaped unit blocks, wooden doll houses, furniture, peg people, wooden cars, and different colored fabrics, Legos in the cave.
•Rationale: to support children's creativity and problem solving skills, to develop mathematical skills/awareness of geometry, and to allow for opportunities for social interaction as children collaborate and build together. To continue the already rich social and creative play surrounding building with hollow blocks, by allowing children to reflect and build upon previous block experiences. Legos provide a different building experience on a smaller scale with different materials, such as wheels.
•Skills: large motor development, expressive creation, symbolic representation, cooperative play, creative problem solving, social problem solving, mathematical thinking, and counting (one-to-one correspondence), fine motor development

Sensory
•Materials: water, various containers, materials for sinking and floating
•Rationale: to cooperatively work together while exploring a familiar sensory experience, to emphasize concepts of volume and conservation. To further the children's understanding of water by exploring with what materials will sink and float. Encourage prediction making and active experimentation.
•Skills: large and fine motor development, hand-eye coordination, knowledge of conservation, scientific exploration, cooperative play, social relationships building, sharing materials, observation and recording, predicting-making, comparing and contrasting.

Math and Manipulatives
•Materials: puzzles, memory games, mosaic tiles and grids, rectangular "problem-solving" puzzle
•Rationale: to encourage children to work with open-ended materials where they can develop more complex skills and collaborate to support each other's learning, to encourage beginning mathematical concepts, such as counting, sorting, and patterning. To support complex problem-solving skills. To encourage cooperation and communication between peers while highlighting new mathematic concepts such as patterning and numeral recognition.
•Skills: number/numeral recognition, patterning skills, matching, one-to-one correspondence, counting, fine motor development, problem solving.

Expressive Art
•Materials: primary colors (red, blue, and yellow) mixing at the easel and at the table, natural materials for collage, clay, markers, crayons, colored pencils, scissors, beads laces, bottle caps, glue, and tape.
•Rationale: to explore with hands and tools to promote sensory awareness, increase fine motor skills, foster social relationships as children observe and work together with their peers, and engage in an in-depth investigation of a basic elements of art.
•Skills: fine motor development (strength, coordination), creativity, symbolic representation, sensory input, color recognition, identification of texture.

Science
•Materials: cockroaches, beetles, mealworms, salamander, decomposed pumpkin, mirrors, magnifying glasses, prisms, kaleidoscopes, flower bulb.
•Rationale: to support children's curiosity of the natural world around us and to encourage the investigation of nature. To encourage children to begin using different tools to observe, investigate and record, while focusing on the sense of sight. To encourage deeper investigation into growth and change by watching and caring for a plant in our classroom as it grows from bulb to flowering plant. To continue the long-term investigation of a decomposing pumpkin, and to record the changes it has undergone over the break.
•Skills: observation, scientific investigation and inquiry, outdoor/indoor connection, making comparisons, recording change over time.

Language and Literacy
•Materials: the writing center has a variety of writing utensils, paper, envelopes, staplers, tape, pictures of children in our classroom, alphabet chart, dictionary.
•Rationale: to involve children in writing and the social activity of note and letter writing. To give children the opportunity to create their own stories and writings. New resource texts are available to encourage familiarity with print and to show the many uses of the written word.
•Skills: fine motor, pre-writing, and letter recognition, using texts in a variety of ways.
•Materials: The library has been updated with texts to focus on the changes experience in winter, as well as books that highlight the alphabet and numerals.
•Rationale: to encourage reading time with friends and teachers, encourage exploration of fiction and nonfiction texts. In addition, the children are also encouraged to regard books as a source of information.
•Skills: receptive language, early literacy, listening, and community building.

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Special Announcements:
Elizabeth will be lead teaching as our two new student teachers, April and Tali, become familiar with the children and the daily routine.

Please continue to send your children dressed for outdoor play!

Save the Date: Gym Jam will be held on January 20th.

Snacks:
Monday - Cucumber slices & saltines
Wednesday - Animal crackers & milk
Thursday - Cereal & milk

Times are approximate, please check with the teachers for specific days/activities' times)

• 12:30-1:10 (weather permitting) Playground structured and unstructured activities ... large motor/nature component, discussions/large group

• 1:10-1:40 Coming back inside... clothes off, explore time

• 1:40-1:55 Large group (if we didn't have one outdoors)

• 1:55-2:10 Focused activities in smaller groups and facilitated by the teachers.

• 2:10-3:00 Free play

• 3:00-3:15 Snack

• 3:15-3:30 Dismissal

We will begin baking/cooking as soon as we get comfortable with the new schedule. I will let you know as soon as we have opening for parents!

We will continue to go to the gym on Mondays. Length and additions will depend on the weather.

Overview and Goals
Happy New Year and Welcome back to school everyone! The first couple of weeks back at school will be a period of readjustment. I am hoping that it won't take long for all of us to settle back into our routines. The teachers will be supporting children's readjustment and re-acquaintance with each other. The children know Kate; and Marie has been around, so I believe that this will ease the children's transition back to school. Our classroom reveals changes that state the teachers' intentions for this session. The science area has moved and is strategically located right at the entrance to our classroom; science will guide many of our big topics during this session. We have made sure to provide lots of opportunities for cooperation and interactions. We also have incorporated a variety of means for self-expression through different media and the children will be able to communicate using multiple "languages."

Expressive Arts
The easel is back!
~Materials: Easel, brushes, paint, paper.
~Rationale: Offer opportunities for creative expression and symbolic representation.
~Skills: Self-expression, fine motor, symbolic representation, creative expression.
Winter collage
~Materials: A variety of special and appealing materials from our art closet that makes us think of winter, glue, scissors, tape.
~Rationale: Offer the children opportunities to "create winter."
~Skills: Self-expression, fine motor.
Clay
~Materials: Clay, clay utensils.
~Rationale: Offer one more media for self-expression and creative expression. We will start this session by getting re-acquainted with how it feels and smells, how to work with it and its endless possibilities for creative expression.
~Skills: Fine motor, strength, creative expression.
Sensory Materials
~Materials: Snow table, snow, small shovels, and small molding containers.
~Rationale: Mirror the outdoors. Offer the children a "warmer" nook to experiment with snow.
~Skills: Creative expression, sensory input.
Science
We will focus our attention on animal life, focusing with "birds." We will discuss winter survival "tactics" and adaptations animals may have during this season. Last session we talked about migration and how many birds need to leave the cold winter. During this session, we will concentrate on birds that don't migrate. Our bird feeder will offer opportunities to investigate birds' behavior first-hand and tie nicely with our winter homework. We will continue to draw children's attention to the variety of birds that visit our playground. To expand on other kinds of birds, we are planning a field trip to The Bell Museum and a possible visit to The Raptor Center at the University of Minnesota- St. Paul Campus. More details to come.
~Materials: Stuffed crow and pheasant, feathers, nests, magnifying glasses, sorting cards. Fish.
~Rationale: Create community awareness of birds, different types; what makes them special and unique.
~Skills: Scientific inquiry, observation, generalizing, making use of appropriate sources of information, reasoning, grouping, conceptual knowledge-knowledge of the natural world, descriptive language, heuristic language, informative language, symbolic representation, peer interactions.
The death of our tadpole will provide us with the opportunity to discuss animal life cycles.
Math, Manipulative and Game
We will start this session by picking up where we left off before winter break: emphasizing the concept of patterning.
Patterning and Puzzles.
~Materials: Button mosaics, lacing beads, puzzles featuring winter, animals in general and birds in particular in both inset and interlocking versions.
~Rationale: During the previous session, we exposed the children to concepts such as sorting, matching, and categorizing. Knowledge of these concepts is necessary for creating patterns, a concept we introduced the children to, and will now continue, only we will offer opportunities to deepen the children's understanding by bringing this concept to our everyday activities. Patterning is an important pre-academic concept and patterns can be found all around us. Life cycles, days of the week, and schedules, are patterns. These "simple" things at first sight are going to prepare the children for later mathematical, algebraic and more complicated concepts. By offering open-ended materials (where children can create their own patterns freely) and structured activities (during large group or when playing structured games) we will strengthen children's understanding of what patterning means in everyday life and we will be giving them a solid foundation for years to come. Puzzles will also be offered in order to support the building of concept knowledge, one-to-one correspondence and whole/part relationships.
~Skills: Patterning, concept knowledge, one-to-one correspondence and whole/part relationships.
Dramatic, Symbolic Play
~Materials: Woodland plastic animals, forest animals, birds stuffed animals, tree cuttings, logs, fabric, pillows, books about animals and hibernation. Kitchen set and utensils. Construction tools. Fabric to use as animal costumes.
~Rationale: We will continue to explore hibernation and winter survival. The dramatic and symbolic play areas are designed to support children's discussions and to offer opportunities to enhance their understanding of this topic. Provide opportunities for self-expression, creative expression, imagination and creativity.
~Skills: Role-play, symbolic representation, social interactions, discussions and conversations related to animals and their habitats as well as yearly cycles, problem solving, and sharing.
Blocks
~Materials: Hollow blocks, unit blocks, ramps, wood boards, and big fabric pieces.
~Rationale: Offer the children opportunities for creative building. Opportunities to enhance dramatic play scenarios or create dramatic play scenarios. Opportunities for social play and practice a variety of social skills (problem solving, sharing, dealing with space, working together, discussing).
~Skills: Mathematical concepts such as symmetry, dimensions and fractions. Spatial skills, creative building, large motor, strength, and social skills.
Language and Literacy
We have made sure to incorporate opportunities for language and literacy in all areas of the classroom. We have book selections scattered in strategic places in the classroom such as the dramatic and symbolic play areas, science and writing area.
~Materials: Books related to topics discussed in the classroom, fun and old favorite books, pencils, thin markers, paper, envelopes, glue sticks, staplers, tape, clipboards.
~Rationale: We are hoping to encourage children to continue to add to their personal journals; writings, drawings and notes taken by teachers will be added to these.
~Skills: Letter recognition and use, fine motor, descriptive and creative writing, dictation.
Large Motor
~The gym set up displays our basic equipment. We will arrange and use the same equipment we had before break after the first week of school. The climbing wall supporting coordination, jumping, depth perception and turn taking. The monkey bars offering opportunities for upper and lower body strength and coordination as well as depth perception when crossed on the top. A-frames and crossing metal bridge to enhance depth perception, coordination, climbing up and down. The Rolling slide to support coordination, core strength and joy!
~Our time in the playground will be dedicated to unstructured and structured large motor activities as well as deepen children's interest on science related explorations.
Music and Movement/Large Group
~Getting reacquainted.
~Talk about winter break and the changes around us.
~Discuss our new schedule; starting in the playground.

Looking forward to a wonderful session!

Dalia

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