Sticky Situation

During the rainy days last week we set out a stip of contact paper for some interesting encounters with bare toes and heels...

Its October, Of Course There Are Pumpkins!

The first of our pumpkins arrived this week and was subsequently rolled, thrown, and within minutes of being in the classroom, split right down the middle upon impact with the floor. It gave us the perfect opportunity to crack it open and go exploring inside. We all gathered around the table, and the more adventurous among us jumped at the chance to dig in to the gooey suprises we found. We used words to describe what we felt and what we saw, we named colors and sorted the seeds out from the muck- we were event presented with a fine motor and manipulative challenge by the effort it took to separate the plump seeds from their fleshy home. What a great chance to explore and observe. Today it was a pumpkin, but many items from nature allow for this kind of exploration- objects whose newness inspire deep engagement on the part of the children. What will be next?

Sing, Sing a Song

Interested in hearing Mr. James sound like a bit of a dork making animal noises? Thought so. Click here.

I just want you to know that while I find this track slightly embarassing for me personally, I couldn't resist putting it up to share because of how great the kids sound on it. In the track you'll hear one of our all time (and yes, daily) favorites, "E-I-E-I-O". There is participation from a whole chorus of children here, pulling from the entire spectrum of our current speech development. You'll hear some of our kids joining in with whole words and lines from the song (even, at one point, from across the room), while others sing simple sylables from the chorus, or mimic the animal sounds being created. What you can't hear is how intently each of the children are listening to one another, each joining in with their own approach. Listening, speaking, reading, writing. Its all connected. What a great way to join in together and all find ourselves on the same page with intense listening and speech.

Oh, and if I catch any flak from anyone about my animal sounds, I promise it will be the last audio track I share on here.

Parachutes on the Playground

Last week, Melissa and I had the parachute out and the kids went crazy for it. Along with Nekeshia, we were able to lift it up high into the air and bring it back down again for our own private airborne tent. As we watched the kids run laughing through underneath the colorful fabric, we knew we had a priceless photo opportunity on our hands- so today we got it out again and brought the camera with us. What is it about tents and small places? In his book Evolutionary Playwork, Bob Hughes talks about major archtypes in the play schemes of young children- things that seem nearly universal to children's play. Among them are themes like care for animals, and the use of tools. He also speaks about the theme of cave-dwelling and tent making. There is a great degree of security provided by such a closed-in space, one that invites peer relationships and exudes the auroa of a world set apart. The parachute lent itself to this kind of play wonderfully. We draped it over the slide set, and soon the kids found themselves in a new private get-away. To see the kind of delight and response that such a simple activity rendered, you need look no further than their expressive faces, pictured below.

Classroom Dress-Up Drive

Here's the third thing. Costume parties are always a little shaky at this age. We go through the trouble of dressing up at home, often with the child getting very confused in the process, and then many of us get uncomfortable at school wearing a costume all day. ("Parties" themselves are often overwhelming experiences for these kids in the classroom setting- they always end in tears.) This is such a contradiction- since dress-up play is one of our all time favorite activities!

Here's our proposal: This Halloween, lets bring in dress-up clothes to share with the classroom and one another. We can have a whole week of new dress-up fun with multiple dress-up opportunities, and do it when the kids feel like participating, rather than for one single party event. This dress-up is not limited to traditional full costumes- simple items and props will do fine: this includes hats, scarves, masks, capes, crowns, coats, etc. The advantage of having Halloween around the corner is that after the holiday, all of those costumes will go on sale! Wouldn't this be a great time to stock up our dramatic play and dress-up area?

Officially, Dress-Up Week will be October 29th to November 2nd- but the dress-up fun will continue long after.

Classroom Pumpkin Patch

Here's the second thing we need your help with: The pending change in seasons is inspiring our senses and inviting new possibilities for materials for our kids to explore in the classroom. We're painting with reds and oranges and browns, we're smelling cinnamon and apple spice in our new playdough, now, how about a pumpkin patch too? If every child brought in a small to medium sized pumpkin to share in the classroom, we could have some pretty interesting play opportunities on our hands. One day we might scoop out the insides to get our hands slimy, another we might bake the seeds for a tasty treat. We could paint them, roll them, cover them with stickers, and there's sure to be a jack-o-lantern or two in the mix. It all depends on what the children's response is.

Opportunites for exploration are not limited to pumpkins, of course. If you have something else that has caught your child's interest lately that you think might be of interest to the other children as well, by all means, bring it in! It might be a bug, or a special hat, or a new material to use. You never know what will catch our kids attention- so whatever it is, lets try it out!

Family Poster

We need your help with three things this month. The first is a family poster. We'll give you the piece of cardboard, your job is to fill it with photographs of your family, people your child knows, pets, or pictures of activities that your child enjoys. Just take a look around the house and see what you have. We will be laminating these posters (otherwise, the photographs will all get picked off again by our curious hands) so make sure that anything going on the poster can stay on the poster. We will use these posters in the classroom as talking points for conversation with the kids. We employ simple images already (a child eating cake, a father and son washing the dog, etc) to ask questions and use the ever-growing list of words at our disposal to describe those images and tell stoires about them. This kind of literacy oriented activity will be deeply enriched by images the children are familiar with- it will add a whole new layer of meaning and motivation, and it will bring a little more of your family into our classroom. Thanks for your participation!

New Friends

Melissa took these photographs today, and I think they tell a wonderful story about two of our kids making new friends with one another in the classroom- over a matter of accessorizing no less. The expressions on Landon and Sarah's face tell the whole thing...

Focus On: Sensory Experience (Part 2): Paper Table

Here was another sensory manipulative adventure in the classroom. Shredded paper! Bringing in a new material like this big tub of shredded paper presents new questions to our kids. What looks like a big mess on the outside (many of you asked us how excited we were to clean this one up!), is also an opportunity for our children to pose and explore questions about something they've never used before. What are the properties of this material? What does it do when I clump it together? How easily does it separate? Does it stick to the wall? Does it stick in my hair? How does it fly? How does it fall? How do we gather it all together? And where do we put it when we're done? The newness of the material kept our children busy all week, testing and questioning with the attentiveness and joy of scientific minds.

Focus On: Sensory Experience (Part 1): Table Suds

Sensory experiences are still as big a part of our classroom as they were when our children were infants. Back then, as our babies grew within the span of their sensori-motor cognitive development, we explained this in the context of our children's brain development. They learned from their senses. They were comforted by soft, smooth surfaces, intrigued by the crinkling, crunching sounds of foil pannels, delighted in the cool squeaky splash of thin puddles. These sensory experiences gave the children motivation for the manipulation of their environment. They found pulleys that rang chimes, or paper to crumple and tear. As their fine motor skills develop to allow more complex manipulative skills, these sensory experiences remain a major pull for our kids. Its part of the reason why they run their hands over a table we've just cleaned with soapy water- or come back to the sink after they've already washed their hands a dozen times that day. In order to give the children more chances in the classroom to touch, to feel, we've conducted activities like the one pictured below, wher Melissa covered the table in soapy paint, much to the curiosity and delight of the children.

D.I.Y. Beach

Larkin digging
Originally uploaded by msmelissa87

What a pleasant surprise we had on the playground today when we found that giant bags of play sand had been delivered. Melissa, Nekeshia and I hauled the bags over to our toddler sandbox and poured 1,000 pounds of new sand out- quite an exciting occurance for our little ones who watched intently as the mounds piled up on top of one another. By the time we had finished, the box was full of new smooth sand. We took our shoes off and let it sift between our toes, and used filters to sort out the wood chips from the clean sand. It was like having a wholenew part of our playground delivered.



Jackson jumping
Originally uploaded by msmelissa87

Benjamin in sandbox
Originally uploaded by msmelissa87

This is a Blog.

A blog, short for "web-log" is an online journal. Its different from a regular website with the advantage that as new items or journal entries are published on it, the old ones are archived along the way. This means that when you visit our blog, the first entry that you see at the top of the page is the most recent one posted. As you scroll down, you will find the entries which preceeded it. For entires that go even further back, all you have to do is look at the "Blog Archive" section in the left-hand column. Clicking on the arrow next to the Months will show all of the journal entry titles for that month, making it easy to find what you're looking for. It also makes it easy for us to track what has happened in our classroom over a long period of time. Here are some other features we espescially enjoy:

PHOTOGRAPHS

One of the things we love most about using this blog is the ease with which we can share photogrpahs from our day on it. The photographs appear in a smaller size in the actual journal entry, however, clicking on the photograph will bring up the full size image in a new screen. When you have a full-sized image pulled up, you can right-click on the image with your mouse and choose "Save", or choose "Save" from the Edit menu of your web-browser. Doing this will give you the opportunity to save the image on your own computer, where you can print it out or save it for your own use. Some of our photographs are hosted on an external photo-sharing site, www.flickr.com. When you click on these images, it will bring you to our flickr.com accounts, where you can actually order prints of the photograph directly from the website. Coupled to the joy of seeing what your child's day looks like while he or she is at school is our desire that these photographs tell a story as well. Sometimes they are stories about blossoming friendships, sometimes they are stories about new discoveries. We hope that the stories these photographs tell will help exhibit the kind of learning and relationship-building taking palce in our classroom, as well as display the joy we share in spending our days together.

COMMENTS

After each journal entry, there is a link that says "Comments" on it. Clicking on this link will provide you with the opportunity to respond to what you are reading about or seeing. This is so important to us! You can use this as a chance to tell us what you think about what's happening in the classroom, ask us questions about why we choose the activity we do, or give suggestions about what we might add. YOU are the number one expert on your child, and by using the Comments sections of our blog, we can enter into dialogue about which directions to pursue next in our learning and play. We welcome comments and questions here- feel free to talk about what you see and read!

Creative Spaces Pt. 2 - A Sensory Rich Environment

This next series of photographs shows Celia, Jordan, Matthew, Landon, and Boone playing in the classroom "fort". This is another space in the classroom that seeks to draw children into playful and collaborative interactions with one another. Additionally, this space is one among several attempts in the classroom to create a sensory-rich experience for the children to interact with. The developmental psychologist Jean Piaget refered to the cognitive development of infants at this age as being in a "Sensori-Motor" period, meaning that there is much brain activity and development focued around sense perception and the use of the senses, as well as motor development. It makes sense when you consider the way infants and toddlers love to feel materials, exploring the properties of a piece of paper as the crush and crinkle it, or deligting in the soft and weightless properties of a feather. The fort's walls are covered with sensory experiences, noisy bubble wrap and tin foil, fabric that glows orange in the right sun light- but the most popular part of the fort by far was the overhanging network of paper flags. (Funny side story- the inspiration for the flags came one evening in a Mexican bar in San Francisco as another preschool teacher friend of mine and I admired the paper flags overhead- we came to the same conclusion simultaneously: "Those would look great in the classroom!" Always on the look-out for new ideas.) In the pictures below, you can see Landon and Boone pulling on a string attached to the fort. When the string is pulled, the entire network of flags above shakes, which is then attached to chimes in another corner of the room, which begin to ring. The kids loved feeling like they could manipulate such a vast space above their heads with a simple tug. It was a fun way to learn about action and response.

Creative Spaces

Hey folks, sorry for the long pause (the end of the semester is always a hectic time)- I'll try to play catch-up with some of the photographs I've told you about.

Here are the first in a series of photographs I took to explore some of the creative spaces in the classroom. We've had several great opportunities this year to create some interesting spaces for the kids that they've really responded to. A big focus in the assessment of environmental standards for infant and toddler care is on the variety and ammount of objects contained in the care environment. While manipulative and sensory objects in the infant-toddler environment are essential, when they become the focus of the child's exploration conflict inevitably ensues. Because objects are easily possessed and accumulated, they can often make relationships with other children competitive, or threatening, no matter how many of a given object are located in the space. By contrast, large, open spaces invite children into relationship with each other, rather than into a focus on a toy. In the pictures below, a simple cardboard box with windows cuts out draws the children into games of hide and seek with one another as they surprise and laugh at one another, delighted at the smiling and familiar faces they find around each corner. While we will work with our kids on sharing toys and objects and playing collaboratively with them when the time becomes developmentally appropraite to do so, a simpler, more appropriate step in the meantime is to introduce them to spaces and opportunities where that kind of collaborative play occurs naturally. In the pictures below, you can see Boone, Jordan, Celia, Matthew, and Benjamin all interact with each other with fun and ease.