Week of the Young Child - Family Night Part One

Who Are These Masked Marvels?

Tonight the Super Families of Room 411 AM class came to celebrate Week of the Young Child.

 Everyone worked together to create each child's Super Kid Super Hero cape, mask and other accessories.

The parents worked with their children using their imaginations to use the materials to create costumes that reflected each child's unique personality.  Each family really enjoyed the Process and they were not focused on the Product, truly showing their understanding of the importance of play.

The grown-ups had to use the hot glue gun, and the Dad's showed great talent in this area!

This cape is getting it's emblem added.

This mom has to handle the grown up scissors.  She is cutting a bed sheet to make the cape.  Making dress up and pretend play clothes does not have to be expensive, you just have to use a little imagination and use items around the house.

This dad is making sure his Super Kid can see through the mask.

This child wanted to be a princess Super Kid and he mom and dad helped her create super jewelry to go with her costume.  It is important to follow the child's lead so the learning can become important and relevant.  These parents did a great job supporting their child's understanding of what made her a Super Kid!

This dad is helping his Super Kid adjust his mask and get his cuff adjusted "just right" before his little hero takes off for flight.

This mom is helping her daughter use feathers to create super jewelry to go with her new cape.

This dad is helping his daughter make her design for her cape become a reality by gluing her ribbon on for her so it doesn't fall off during flight.

We will post more pictures and updates on Week of the Young Child during the week and next week.  We want to thank all of the AM parents who came tonight and supported their Super Kid this week.  We had a great time with you!  We look forward to seeing our PM Super Families on Wednesday night.

Connecting to past learning - from dinosaurs to glaciers

 Earlier this year we did a unit on Dinosaurs (go back through our blog to refresh your memory on paleontology).  During the second semester we are connecting what we are learning now to what we learned earlier this year.  One example is our unit on icebergs and glaciers.  The children created their own glaciers and icebergs out of the abundance of snow  during the January snowstorms.  During the process of freezing and melting the snow each day some of the animals they were playing with in the sensory table became frozen in the iceberg.  Some of the children made the connection to the dinosaur unit back in November in the following way.  Dinosaur bones became trapped in rocks.  The Arctic animals they were playing with became trapped in the ice in the sensory table.  People who tried to get bones out of the ground or ice are called archaeologist.  The children remembered that they were being archaeologist when they started digging the play animals out of the ice in the sensory table.

 They connected their current play to their past play.  This is called LEARNING!  And this critical type of learning cannot be achieved without hands-on, child-directed play. 

You will see more and more play experiences during the second semester that connects current play to past play creating more concrete and long term learning.

These children are excavating, using their tools, chiseling through the frozen ice trying to free the frozen animals from the glaciers.  The students are developing fine motor skills, strengthening their hands for proper grip on writing utensils,  working together as a team to remove the ice, problem solving  how to remove the hard ice without using warm water, how to negotiate space and take turns, using their vocabulary, and most importantly, using their past knowledge learned during our dinosaur unit and applying that knowledge to thier current play in the sensory table.

What animals are frozen in the icy waters?  Which ones are mammals?  Do they get cold?  Why?  Why not?  What keeps animals from getting cold in the icy water?  Make sure you ask good open-ended questions and not just yes and no questions.  You might be amazed what the children will teach you!



Now the children wanted to create their own glaciers and icebergs.  Needless to say, Ms. Sarah, Ms. Nancy and Ms. Carole Dawn spent a lot of time bringing in snow from outside so our young scientists/meteorologists could create their own glacier.  Some of the students even created their own land masses.  Maybe we will have to teach the children about places like Iceland and Greenland and put up maps that show cold places like Antartica.



These students created several glaciers and noticed that rivers formed between them.  Next they wanted to create boats to navigate between the glaciers.  With this activity the students showed an interest and an acuity toward understanding land formations, waterways and how people travel by land and water.  This is one of the most critical ways we find out what the children are interested in and how we can create activities that spark their imaginations.

We are the dinosaurs!!!!!!

Welcome to the wonderful world of dinosaurs and all that we are going to learn over the next few weeks.

The children have shown a great interest in learning about dinosaurs so we have introduced the unit.  This last week has been spent doing research.  They looked through books in the library area to learn about dinosaurs to investigate their environments.  They also did Internet research to discover what a paleontologists was and to learn more about volcanoes.  They started learning how to excavate items in the sensory table.  The children practiced mathmatics by working with geometric shapes with a special tessellation dinosaur puzzle.  They developed their gross motor skills by walking like dinosaurs using Romper Stompers (I loved those things as a kid) while listening to the song "We Are The Dinosaurs, Wadda Ya Think Of That?  It is a very catchy tune! I will put the children's video by the artist on the blog for you.

Keep checking back often over the next few week to see what new exciting things the children are doing in the Land of the Lost!  We will be excavating dinosaurs, rocks and shells out of boulders made out of plaster of paris (thanks Leah's dad for the donation).  We will also be making our own volcanoes out of clay that will erupt using baking soda and vinegar.  The children will also be painting and creating their dinosaur world in the block area.  Look for pictures to be posted as they use their creativity, research and artistry to recreate the setting for their dinosaur play.

Friends researching dinosaurs together.

 

This child drew this picture of a dinosaur after he finished researching dinosaurs in a book in the library area.  He told me that the spikes on the tail are like the spikes on the tail of the dinosaur in the book.

Children working together exploring the new dinosaur items in the sensory table.  Dinosaurs, brushes, logs, trees, rocks and other items were placed in the table to encourage the children to pretend being paleontolgists.

This child is working very carefully to remove all "dirt" (cornmeal in this case) after looking up excavation on the internet and watching a video of a dinosaur dig in progress (National Geographic and Chicago Field Museum are great on-line resources if you want to support further exploration with your child at home).



Pretend play in the sensory table.



Look out, it is a herd of dinosaurs coming!  Can't you hear how loud they are?  Can you feel the ground shaking?

I found these at Barnes and Nobles for $5.99 on clearence.  It is a magnetic board with an instruction book and foam puzzle pieces that are also magnetic.



dramatic play - cooking together

In September we did a unit on cooking.  We put a lot of items into dramatic play and let the children use their minds to create together.  Here are some pictures of their process.

Beans and rice and salt and flour and sugar and all kinds of fun things to mix together and create things with in dramatic play.  I wonder what Chef Ramsey would say?



The children working together to create new recipes.



Dumping and sorting and filling and mixing things together.

Now the children have added containers so they can sort their creations into serving sizes and serve their new creations to the teachers and to their friends.