” You are never too old, too wacky, too wild, To pick up a book and read to a child.”

It was a chance for us to have a wonderful morning of celebration at the preschool with the parents and children.

Every five or six weeks, we gather as children, parents, and teachers together to enjoy a morning of fun and learning. This time, we arrived with Dr. Seuss books in hand.

Arrival time gave parents a chance to read to the children until morning meeting. We have morning meeting every morning to greet the children, tell them what is happening in their day, and tell the choices inside the classroom that are new that day..

Morning meeting this time started with a reading of The Cat in the Hat. Then the children stood up and tried to recreate some of the balancing moves of the Cat.  Ty and the children also introduced the parents to their favorite movement song and everyone was up and moving.

The last part of the meeting introduce to  the parents and the children a book they were going to create together, in the spirit of Dr. Seuss’ All About Me Book .

The parents and children went to tables stocked with art supplies and found their own ALL about Me books.

Together, they worked to answer the questions on the pages. With measuring tapes, they found how tall they were; with pens, they drew around their hands and compared sizes. They wrote about who was in their family and about their pets.  They answered questions that began, I  like…., I wish…., I am afraid of…., I dream about…., and if I were an animal, I would be….

They created self-portraits. It was such an involved and fun time as children and their parents learned lots about each other.

Then it was time to adjourn to the other room and have snack. Snack’s culmination, of course, was singing Happy Birthday to Dr. Seuss and eating Angel Food cake. It was a great morning filled with books, movement, and learning about ourselves. Dr. Seuss was always a master of having great fun while helping children learn.

Dr. Seuss is an author who  easy to undervalue because his books seems so light and fun. However, his books are actually quite useful as well.  He began a reading movement during a time when the books schools used to teach reading were very  dull. He felt that books that taught reading could be captivating and good learning at the same time. His books were designed have roughly 200 words and to incorporate repetition and rhyme so that children could develop mastery and experience success. They included  sight words that children would need to master.

He joined with Phyllis and Bennet Cerf, major editors at Random House, to create the Beginning Reading series. They invited some other excellent children’s authors to write using the same format. You probably know some, Go Dog Go and Are You my Mother? ; they are favorites at the school. This writing effort has not only brought great happiness to children for many years but also proved that children learn best when they are presented with material that delights as well as instructs.

Other books of Dr. Seuss have a meaningful messages about topics such as environmentalism and social justice. The Lorax, for example, is a remarkable story about a character “who speaks for the trees”.  He felt books could be interesting and also convey important values. Please check through Amazon.com for his many offerings.

Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss and Thank You.Tweet

For the month of March,  our morning meeting every day with the children will  feature  the children sharing with each other the books they love. When the meeting is over, they can join the reading area where teachers and parent volunteers will read the many wonderful selections during choice time.

We have learned about lots of new books, everything from Sharks vs. Trains to Good Boy, Fergus. At the end of the month, I will publish a list of our new finds.

Why celebrate Dr. Seuss birthday? Firstly, it will be great fun witht Cat in the Hat and Greeen Eggs and Ham. On a broader level, Read Across America, an event that brings together Random House, publishers of the Dr. Suess books and the National Education Association  believes that “when we celebrate Dr. Seuss and reading, we send a clear message to America’s children that reading is fun and important.”

We send that message to our children every day as we read a wonderful range of children’s literature but this month we will have  another delightful way to bring books alive for our children.

Because, In Seussville,

You are never too old, too wacky, too wild

To pick up a book and read to a child.

I hope you enjoy many great books with your child this month.Tweet

For Chanukah, a child’s mom and dad brought in all of the ingredients  and helped the children to  make potato latkes. They proved to be very popular at snack; applesauce on top  of the latkes was the favorite but some of the children joined me and tried the sour cream.

They also took turns pretending to light the Menorah, carefully holding the shamus as though it was really lit and counting the nights.

The children who celebrate Chanukah told us about their own evening celebrations with their families.  We put dreidels on the table; they were great fun even though they were hard to get spinning. Singing the Dreidel Song helped. It became one of the best known songs by the time we reached the winter sing.

One of our families comes from Sweden and on the 13th of December, the Swedes celebrate St. Lucia Day as a national holiday. At school, our Swedish mom brought special lussekatt (Lucia buns)  and pepparkaka (gingerbread). She helped the children make the traditional crowns  Staffan hats.

We also celebrated the Christmas holiday. We read great Christmas stories; my favorite is the Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg. Parents helped us to  decorate Christmas cookies and  make baker’s dough ornaments.

Throughout the last two weeks, we sang songs about Chanukah, Christmas, and Winter. By the time we reached the Winter sing, we were really good at Jingle Bells (with accompanying bells) and Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel. Deck the Halls was fun because when the Falalalalala part came, the children really sang with flair. The children requested Rudolf the Red Nose Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman even though they didn’t know many of the words.

The culminating moment came when the parents and children came at 7 pm to the back of the classroom where the room was lit only with twinkle lights. They were greeted with appetizers and then we all sat together and sang. My favorite moment was when the children realized they were singing their songs and that they were being sung by everyone; they had become a part of a larger shared experience with their families and teachers. We culminated  in laughter  and singing as I tried to keep up with the singers while I turned the pages of the Twelve Days of Christmas.

We finished with desserts made by the families. Hopefully everyone went home with visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads.

We wish everyone a very happy holiday season and joy with your own family.Tweet

The best way to describe our preschool is that we are a Parent Involvement School. Our parents come from diverse backgrounds and includes a number of working parents. We welcome the diversity that comes when our families represent a wide range of socio-economic, racial, ethnic, cultural, professional, and religious backgrounds. There is also considerable variability in the time that our parents have available to contribute their  talents and efforts to the school.

We welcome family involvement in a variety of ways that meet the needs of our diverse population. Parents are encouraged  to volunteer, be it  regularly reading to children, bringing in a wonderful snack, sharing a skill or talent, or helping us with the parent/child special days we have each month.

In addition,  there are many other ways to be part of the school. Twice a month we have parent coffees at 9 am. where parents come together to discuss parenting  concerns,  challenges, and successes and to  support each other with ideas and empathy.

We have regular parent potlucks in the early evening where parents share a collaboratively prepared meal and then, over dessert,  discuss a topic of common interest.  At our next gathering we will focus on limit setting, a very popular topic right now.

Every 4 to 5 weeks, we have  special parent/child gatherings during the preschool morning.  They range from the Teddy Bear Picnic to Green Day. Our recent Teddy bear Picnic brought to a close two weeks when the children brought their teddy bears, listened to bears stories, danced with them, sorted them by size and color, and created a bear story to add to the  picture of them with their bear, just to name a few of the activities.

The picnic was typical of CCP parent/child gatherings. Parent volunteers helped the children make sandwiches and wash fruit for the picnic held at 11:20 am. A picnic area was readied in our other room with blankets, the food  and a few surprise bears. As the remainder of the parents arrived, we all sat together for a reading of the Teddy Bear Picnic.

Then it was time to march to the picnic, bears in arms. As the children settled in and  the parents helped serve the food, I read the stories the children had written about the bears. This was the first time some of the children had heard their words shared with a group; they were thrilled with the laughter and happy responses. This was one of many literacy experiences where children connect their words and the words of other’s stories to the written word. Literacy should always be relevant.

The picnic ended with everyone around the parachute, tossing the bears up into the sky, watching them come down, and sending them back up again.

Parent/ child gatherings are shared events that relate to the curriculum in the school or the festivities of different cultures. We do not have child performances, rather, we invite everyone to partiicpate.We vary the time they are held, sometimes first thing in the morning, sometimes before lunch to allow for maximum particpation. They are always a wonderful chance for parents, teachers, and children to join to together and share a great experience.

In this mix of options, our parents have succeeded in forging bonds with their children’s experiences at  preschool as well as in feeling part of close and supportive parent community. Everyone benefits when families have strong relationships with their children’s school.Tweet

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There are so many wonderful stories about Teddy Bears. We read many of the during our Teddy Bear Theme. Here are some of our favorites; many can be found on Amazon.com.  Best enjoyed with your favorite stuffed bear by your side.

Corduroy by Don Freeman is a great children’s book with several sequels.

Beady Bear by Don Freeman, a bear who learns about friendship and reciprocity

Godilocks and the Three Bears illustrated by Jan Brett. Beautifully illustrated.

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, Panda Bear, Panda Bear, What Do You See? and Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear? by Bill Martin Jr. Loved by all preschool ages. Also good early readers.

Leo the Late Bloomer and Milton the Early Riser by Robert Kraus. Leo and his father learn that everyone blooms in their own good time. Milton is awake before everyone, helps put everything right after a windstorm and is asleep again as the everyone wakes up.

Good Night,  Pippin by Joan Elizabeth Goodman, unusual but very popular story that is good for bedtimes as well.

Paddington Bear and Paddington’s Garden by Michael Bond and Fred Banbery. The classic about a bear who comes to live with an English family.

Bear’s Birthday and Bread and Honey by Frank Asch. These are part of collection of Bear Stories that are lovely.

Little Bear by Else Holmelund Minarik. The caring relationship between a mother bear and her little one.

ENJOY!Tweet

Our school is a developmental, play based  program where children have blocks of time for free play of their choosing. As teachers, we develop curriculum that we feel children will enjoy and learn from as well as create curriculum that responds to their interests. Teddy Bears was our idea; it is a lovely and comforting way to start the new school year with many new children.

In this pictorial posting, I hope to give you an insight into the way we create exciting and meaningful themes to add to the ongoing activities of the classroom. In a different posting, I will show you a theme that was created from children’s interests. We begin planning once we have a theme in mind. We want to touch on a number of curricular areas: books, food, music, movement, sorting, graphing, group talking and listening, art, dramatic play, blocks, parent involvement and, of course, fun.

Our teddy bear time together began with the arrival of the bears. They each got a name tag and joined the shelf with the bear books and the other bears. Throughout the day, the bears came down to join in activities. Each bear was photographed with it’s child to be used for story telling and sorting. The bears watched as the children created bear collages,  made big, middle, and small  bear cutouts at the play dough table.

The children each told the story of their bear to a teacher or the volunteering grandparent at the drawing/writing table.  We loved the variety of the children’s stories from the bear who was given to the boy by his daddy to the one who had to visit Target in an airplane.

We also read many books about bears. We had a selection of bear books from Corduroy, Beady Bear, and Going on a Bear Hunt to a visiting book called The Lazy Bear. Please see the bear book list on a different posting. Literacy is also woven into our curriculum through reading, story writing, and story sequencing.

First the bears were individually introduced at group time. It is an important skill to learn both how to talk to your friends as well as how to listen to what they have to say to you. Great bears with good names and stories make the listening fun.

Music and Movement are a part of every day and some of it relates to the ongoing theme. Everyone  brought their bears to group time and acted out the song as we sang “Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, Turn Around”. The bears and the children were were part of the action as  we went on a bear hunt both with the book and the song.

At group time, we sorted the bears; who had the biggest bears, who had the middle-sized bears, and who had the little bears, just like in Goldilocks and the Three Bears.  We love Jan Brett’s version with the beautiful illustrations.

Some themes lend themselves more naturally to food and cooking than others. Bears were great fun as we did a tasting of foods that bears like. using a chart to keep track of likes and dislikes. We tried apples, raspberries, blueberries, honey, and sunflower seeds. Almost everyone liked the bear food choices as we recorded their preferences with  smiling and frowning faces on the chart. Later that afternoon, when we added the bear food into snack time, a little boy was surprised when I said I knew he liked sunflower seeds. “How do you know that?”, he asked. I got out the chart; I loved the look of realization when he saw that we could figure it out from what we had written earlier. He wanted to review everyone’s likes and dislikes and “read” the chart for us as I pointed to the different items.

The end of our theme came with a wonderful Teddy Bear Picnic. We had read the book and planned a picnic. Parents were invited to join us for a picnic with food and games. Two volunteer parents came to help us with sandwich making; we added in the popular raspberries and some pumpkin muffins. When the parents arrived, parents, children, and bears gathered together for a reading of the Teddy Bear Picnic. Then off we marched to the picnic where there were a few bears sitting on the floor and the picnic cloths, ready for the picnic.

Every four to five weeks, we invite parents to join us at the school for a time with their children. We have had Thanksgiving feasts, winter sings, valentine’s day where everyone made valentines, a green day complete with green food, art using recycled materials, and a group telling of Green Eggs and Ham. Several of these events are talked about on different posts. Rather than having children perform, we invite parents to participate in the activities that the children are enjoying at school.

While everyone munched on the food, I read each child’s story that went with the picture with their bear. It was the first time the children had heard their words shared with a group and they seemed very excited as the parents and other children responded with laughter and warm sighs. Having children connect their words to writing that can be retold is an important step in understanding how language works. There will be many times they have their language come alive at the preschool.

The Picnic ended when we put all of the bears in a parachute, joined hands, and sent them up into the air. It was a fun end to our picnic and theme.Tweet

Life in the Construction Zone

Life in “construction  zone”  of our preschool is an ever changing place.   There are  a wonderful array of  building materials andtools to choose, Sawhorse and big  2’ 6” by 3’ 6”, sheets of translucent plastic are fabulous for the creation of a house or a small city.  Add towels and food and a whole village comes alive.

Moving boxes were perfect for the “burning” buildings the kids created after the fireman came to visit us.

The smaller ones morphed into  a long train that “traveled” from  one grandparent’s house to another.  Everyone took a job, conductor, ticket taker, passenger. We add the train song , “A train is a comin’, Oh yeah” as it chugged along. Many days were spent hopping in their own train car and going on another trip.

Trains haven’t been the only use for boxes. We looked over one day and noticed that  two empty boxes were wiggling  and some eyes were peeking out. The two box children ended up playing for a long time, sometimes tilting back their housing for some direct  conversation.

A few months ago we added a set of grid builders that interconnect to make different shapes . They have mirrors, holes for shapes to fit through, windows, and holes to crawl through.   At first, they were used as paths and streets for the big vehicles but lately they have seen more use as  home builders.  Their advantage is that you can create connections between building.

Our construction area has a full work table, filled with hammers, pliers, and screwdrivers and hard hats, yellow vests, and tool belts. The children enjoy putting together and taking apart not only the pretend buildings but also many things in the yard. Construction zone is one of the many areas of the preschool yard that provides children many opportunities to create and play out their great ideas.Tweet

Children observing the world around them, asking questions, creating hypotheses, and learning more is science in action in our preschool. Conversations about science are a daily occurrence. The garden is a regular source. But of course there are many other opportunities, both created by us and by nature and events, to learn about biology, physics, chemistry, and the physical world.

The children began the year with an interest in bugs. First the scream, BUG, then some run away, but all return. Out come the magnifying glasses or the cups to hold the subjects, briefly. The dead ones get put in petri dishes and are saved for viewing under the big magnifying glass.

Rocks have been another fascination. We have developed a good collection of rocks, crystals, and “gems” to look at, sort, and look up in our books. Using resources to learn more is a natural part of our investigations, be it the local nursery, a book, or a visiting expert ( see  article on crystals).

Our spring was filled with butterflies and silkworms ( see earlier articles). Here we are launching the last of the cabbage white butterflies, that came from the caterpillars we found on our cabbage plants. Very big eaters, those cabbage whites.

This summer we have been talking about the children’s trips to the beach. Ty created a pretend beach, complete with towels, sun glasses, stuffed marine life, hats, sandals, and shells. The shells were so beautiful to look at and everyone tried to hear the ocean in them. The science table offered a chance to explore a little further and match them to the ones in the book.

Water has been another summer science investigation. Turkey basters pushing the water through tubes to learn about force or tubes held up high to learn how gravity works are very popular right now. Color experiments, tornadoes and fountains in a bottle, oceans in a bottle, and bubble blowing  give children lots of ways to consider the physics of water.

Cooking  is another wonderful way we explore how the state of something can be changed, be it juicing lemons and making lemonade or creating popsicles from our juice.

In a experiential school, children learn by exploring and  doing, asking questions, and learning more from the resources available. As teachers, it is a most exciting way to be with children, supporting and facilitating them as science discoveries become a  natural part of daily life.Tweet

How we take children’s interests and build our curriculum around them.

The warm weather has come and water play is in full swing. From the hose in the 8 tons of sand sandbox to the colored bottles on the science table, water is providing our children with hours of  great fun and many valuable lessons. Our preschool curriculum often develops around what is relevant and interesting to children; two things that are especially interesting right now are water and rainbows and their  colors.

Below, you can get a glimpse of how we follow through with children’s ideas ; hopefully it will offer  you some insight into how we integrate children’s interests into our curriculum over the areas of:

• science,
• art,
• literacy,
• fine motor activities,
• sensory activities.

Rainbow interest began, in part,  when we read Hawaii is a Rainbow by Stephanie Feeney, a beautiful book about Hawaii and its fabulous colors. Here are some of  the exciting things that happened after that.

The children  made bottles of water to have all of the colors of the rainbow. We put them in the window with pictures of real rainbows.

• We got out  the eyedroppers ( good small motor activity) to create rainbows and color designs on paper towels.
• That led to experimenting with the eyedroppers on different paper, including waxed paper, to see what happened.
• We layered tissue paper to create colors and see how colors changed.
• Out came the computer so we could  look at many different pictures of rainbows and talked about how they are made. We looked for the their pattern of color with a question in mind, “Do they always go red, orange, yellow, green, blue violet.” Yes! I showed the children the picture I took last Thanksgiving of a double rainbow that had a double thickness of the colors. Amazing!
• We read a  poem about rainbows.

My heart leaps when I behold

A rainbow in the sky

William Wordsworth

• On the “pretend you are at the beach day”, one of the children discovered that if you wear sunglasses with red lenses, the color of things around you change color. Everyone had to try that out.
• So we added the new colored paddles with red, yellow, and blue color gels for exploring how the things in the classroom look and if they change color.
• Outside, we set out  watercolor, tempura paint, and spray bottles filled with water and  colored paint for art exploration.
• Colored water was set out for experimenting and mixing; could  new colors be created.
• The water table was filled with colored water, tubes, and funnels. It was great fun to watch as the color water passed through the tubes and then mixed with the other color.
• We talked about the physics of force and pressure  as the water was pushed by the turkey basters through the tubes and  funneled into bottles.

• We used big water  bottles with  special connectors to create both fountain and tornado effects. Over and over the bottles were turned upside down to see the water create the vortex or send a fountain up the tube.
• A third bottle was  made mixing mineral  oil, water, and food coloring; they gave it a good  shake  and watched the oil and water combine, then separate.
• Someone asked what it would be like to mix food coloring with sand or salt, so we tried it out  to see what happens. The colors weren’t as clear as expected; the white salt did better than the beige sand.

• Using glue bottles and paper, the children made designs and sprinkled on the new colored sand and salt.

• One day, the inside tables were filled with children making flubber in a rainbow of colors. They stretched and pulled them into different shapes.

Our water and color exploration will continue along side  other curriculum ideas. Gravity looks like the next area of interest as the children were trying out a rain gutter in the big sandbox and tilting it to see what happens. Ramps for the cars and trucks will likely be very popular. Sinking and floating are also likely to be of interest when we introduce them. We will make a chart of what sinks and what floats just the way we did when we figured about what was attracted to magnets and what wasn’t.

And so it goes in preschool as one idea leads to the next. There is always something interesting to explore and to write and read about and to create in art.

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