First, thank you so much to everyone for your positive and supportive feedback yesterday during parent teacher conferences. Mitzi and I take such pleasure in creating and designing projects and activities for your children to engage with. They are such a joy to watch and learn from - every group of children that we work with give us just as much as we give them.
This week we worked on so many different things. We wrapped up our March self portraits, took new March photos, made our second ice cream (chocolate!!), explored how watercolor reacts when we paint on top of crayon or oil pastel, experimented with different shades of green, and we read SO many books together.
As we spoke about during conferences, here are some activities and goals we have going forward in the coming months:
- Practicing scissor work and eventually switching from using two hands to open and shut the blades to using just a thumb and index finger to make it work. We are starting with playdough to cut, and will slowly transfer over to paper.
- Beading and developing stronger hand-eye coordination. We started this today with some heart shaped pasta pieces and pipe cleaners.
- Focusing on drawing circles and lines and slowing down while we draw. We also want to encourage story telling or description after the child is finished working (when we ask during the process, it interrupts their concentration and flow).
- Working on being able to pull pants up and down - great not only for future potty training but also helpful for diaper changes! In the same vein, we are going to encourage putting shoes on and off as well as we head into spring and hope to go outside more frequently.
- Using nursery rhymes and basic stories (like the Three Little Pigs) to act and use our bodies to story tell. Once children use their bodies and are actively participating in the reenactment of a story, it truly comes to life and is more easily absorbed and understood.
- Puppets for story telling as well.
- Looking at and predicting patterns and sequences, both with colors and stories. We will also continue to work on grouping and sorting (i.e. all of these animals live on a farm vs all of these animals live in the jungle).
- Learning the first initials of our names (and the first initials of our friends). Knowing all letters of the alphabet is a skill we expect in pre-k, for now we are going to work organically and naturally with the letter that interests every child the most: their letter!
- Basic tracing of their names (over dotted letters).
- Trying to hop on one foot, follow an obstacle course, and incorporating yoga into our circle time.
And many many many other skills and concepts along the way! As always, please reach out to Mitzi or I if you would like us to focus on any other skills or have ideas for seasonal projects for the class.
Have an amazing weekend, we are looking forward to our busy literacy week next week!