Once Upon a Time . . .
The class has fallen in love with the story “The Three Little Pigs.” You can literally hear a pin drop in the classroom when we are reading the story together. Everyone knocks on the table to imitate the wolf banging on the door, and everyone fills their lungs to huff and puff and blow the houses down. We feel anxious and excited for the pigs as they run from one dwelling to the next, looking for a safe haven.
This passion has been creeping into our dramatic play, storytelling, art work, block building, and other buildings with varied manipulatives (i.e. legos, bristle blocks).
An interest doesn’t stay within one domain, it permeates each activity that we encounter throughout the day. In fact, the big bad wolf even appeared in the form of the wind when we went outside for a walk. We speculated whether or not the wolf/wind could blow down certain buildings, if it could blow our hair away, or if it could blow Rachel over! A few of us embodied the role of the wolf and tried to assist the wind in blowing Rachel down.
We are now adding more classic tales to our repertoire and have noticed that they begin with the line, “Once upon a time.” Next week we hope to read even more classic children’s literature and start writing our own tales.
Picnic Play
Baby care has always been something the children enjoy engaging in. This week they have been taking the babies for picnics and bring baskets of food to share. Dramatic play is an essential mode of learning for early childhood. What is dramatic play? It’s a form of putting on someone else’s shoes and learning about the world from a new perspective. Children assign and accept new roles and breaking down the barriers of reality. Some of the benefits include:
Self Regulation
Creating rules and strategies
Learning how to keep a peer engaged and active in the play
Dramatic play motivates language acquisition
It fosters strong social skills and conflict resolution abilities
It can relieve emotional tension and turmoil
Literacy, math, and science are often used in the play
It is empowering and fosters self confidence
We try to allow the children to come up with their own play scenarios, but we are always there to interject, add a new layer, or toss in a few questions to guide and enhance the direction of the learning.
Other 2A Happenings
Learning how to use a watercolor palette
Still life painting of leaves & talking about spring and how we can tell that it’s coming
Puzzles and strategies
Painting with a strainer/colander
Clay and continued dialogue about bouncy castles
Lego construction (We are going to try to use smaller legos for building since we are masters with the duplo size)
Creating a Wolf and Pig with butcher paper and tempera paints - this is ongoing. We will be cutting them out, stuffing them to give them dimension, adding collage materials, and creating scenery.
Specialists
Ernestina played a game to revisit our emotions in Spanish and we talked about different body parts and what we wear on each.
Diane had us mix banana and coconut milk together to make another smoothie.
Coach C challenged us to keep our balls on polyspots as we made little kicks through the gym. We also played a freeze game.
Andrew sang the book “An Octopus Followed Me Home” and “Chicka Chicka Boom Boom.” We also used our bodies and voices to act out planting a seed, waiting for it to grow, and seeing it become a flower.
Reminders
BMS is closed next Friday, March 6th for Staff Development
BMS is closed Friday, March 13th for Parent Teacher Conferences / SIGN UP HERE
Literacy week is March 23-27 / We will start signing up to be guest readers next week, and there will be an amazon wishlist of books that the class would love to receive
Curriculum Breakfast #2 will be on Friday, April 3rd from 9:00-9:40, details coming soon