We use the Experience Preschool with Mother Goose Time curriculum. This month features Community Helpers. What a better way to learn about Community Helpers than to hit the street and see workers and helpers in action? Our first field trip was the local post office. To prepare, we laced mail carrier bags and wrote post cards to our families. The post office is within walking distance to our school so we were able to take a nice walk in the freshly fallen snow. We learned about where to place our mail with postage, how it is collected, then sorted. There are so many different sizes of boxes and envelopes to choose from when mailing items. Our next field trip required a bus ride and the girls had fun pretending they were driving the bus. Our Experience Preschool Curriculum arrives in a cool bus box each month. The Leelanau Enterprise prints a weekly newspaper, brochures, letterhead, business cards and so on. As we toured the building, we learned about the many jobs that are necessary to print the newspaper and other items each week. My husband is the Creative Director and led us on the field trip. He made "I Spy" cards for us to use and the children had so much fun searching for items. The highlight of the trip was seeing the large press in operation. Sometimes the field trip comes to you. A utility worker checked our classroom for carbon monoxide because a nearby business had concerns about the air quality in their space. (We have not had any concerns or illnesses). The gentleman was a good sport about my questions about the tools he was using. He even posed for a photo! Thank you for coming along on our field trips. We hope to visit three local shops, a credit union and a hair salon yet before Christmas break.
0 Comments
I recently had our first quarter parent-teacher conferences. One of the topics we discussed is the importance of learning how to rhyme and I highlighted a few of the benefits that come from listening to stories that rhyme. Children learn to anticipate the rhyming word, which leads to important prediction skills necessary for reading later on. Cognition and social-emotional skills increase also as a child looks forward to interacting with a book that is filled with rhymes. That is why they ask you to read the same book again and again. Phonological awareness is another benefit as well. Alison Lee Felt from ReadingPartners.org states, "Through exposure to rhyme in books kids learn to segment words into phonemes, improving their decoding and comprehension abilities." Click here to read more on the Read Across America page. Our preschool curriculum kit from Experience Preschool comes with a month worth of literacy lesson plans, including a nursery rhyme poster and several activities to go with it. This month, Jack Be Nimble is our nursery rhyme which I displayed at our Circle Time area. During one of our skill time sessions, I substituted the name "Jack" with a child's name card. Once the child recognized their name, they jumped over our pretend candlestick while we emphasized the words quick and candlestick. Our preschool curriculum will include other hands-on games that will focus on phonemic awareness also. Cube cards (letters, photos that begin with the letter sound, numbers and shapes) are always included. We build the letters with loose letter parts, practice writing them in the monthly journal, write them in sensory trays, etc. I love that I don't have to spend hours writing lesson plans, gathering supplies, and worrying that I have included all of the necessary skills. There are times that I will change an activity to suit our day or the children in the group. However, so much is already planned out for me. Love! Experience Preschool provides a book each month and will suggest others as well. Dr. Seuss is our go-to for emphasizing opposites and rhyming. The Cooperative Children's Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has a list of culturally appropriate books that feature rhyming. Click here for the list. What are some of your favorite books that feature rhymes? Please share below!
Our preschool program receives the Experience Preschool with Mother Goose Time curriculum in exchange for the documented use of the curriculum. Here, I show you how I use this preschool curriculum in our Catholic, full-day preschool program. The preschool curriculum, including the scope and sequence, is already planned out for us. As a busy director and lead teacher, I truly appreciate this. A Core Concepts bag is included in our curriculum kit each month. We focus on 3 new letters (and their sounds), two numbers, one shape and one color. These "Core Concepts" are embedded in a monthly theme, making learning rich and meaningful. For example, it is more interesting to count, sort and graph small pigs while learning about Down on the Farm, then it would be to do a math activity with a completely unrelated object such as bears. We receive two sets of manipulatives each month and the children absolutely love them. Below is how I choose to display our Core Concepts each month. We review them at Opening Circle and Closing Circle each day. We will take them off the wall for a skill time activity also. The children have enjoyed using the vehicles during skill time because we have been talking about firefighters, bus drivers and so on. The Teacher Tool bag includes the beautiful and easy to use Teacher Guides, a skill poster, theme web, lesson plan calendar among other things. Next, I set up my simple lesson plan book (not included in the curriculum kit). This is an extra step I choose to do, however it really does not add a lot of time to my preparation. I have the following headings:
I then add in special events, what day we will attend Mass, half-day schedules, etc. From there, I decide where I will place the activities from the Experience Preschool Teacher Guide into my lesson plan book. I use the "Small Group Math" and "Table Top Literacy" activities from the Teacher Guide for my Skill Time Group sessions (am and pm). Children are assigned to one teacher so that we can get to know the children better, including how we can assist them or challenge them further. The Experience Preschool curriculum includes suggestions for simplifying or challenging each activity, which is very helpful. This is just a brief overview to give you an idea of how I use the Experience Preschool curriculum in our program. You can watch this video to see how I organize the materials that arrive each month. Feel free to leave a comment down below or email me with questions about how we approach our preschool curriculum.
I recently had a chance to use the new Experience Toddler Curriculum with my granddaughter Iris. We used the Community Helpers theme one weekend (and since then). Below is my honest opinion of this new curriculum subscription box. Each subscription box comes with an overview guide, an assessment recording sheet, activity cards, books, games, manipulatives and the majority of the materials needed to complete the activities. The activity cards are printed on durable glossy card stock and very easy to read. Iris is 2 years 9 months and I chose to do the older toddler suggestions. Iris chose to flip a few of the pattern cards over and sort the foam pieces by color. She then matched the triangles on the reverse side of one of the cards. We use trays for our activities (inspired by her Montessori school). She explored this activity for approximately 5 minutes. We read a beautiful This Little Piggy Book, then Iris "read" it several times on her own. She was drawn to the simple, yet attractive illustrations. Iris was familiar with this nursery rhyme and was eager to go through the book several times. The story is read aloud on the CD that is included in the kit. There are so many fun songs on the CD that I look forward to doing with Iris! This adorable sticker project was a fun extension activity. We had a cup full of coins that needed to be put in to our bank, so we used this opportunity to have Iris practice her fine motor skills while talking about piggy banks and saving money. The materials are packaged in clear bags by weekly themes. It made it very easy to see our choices and dive in to the activities. Once we were done with an activity, I placed in on a little tray and stored it on her toy shelf. I have to say, I am very impressed with this subscription box. It would be perfect for a parent and child to use on a daily basis, for a home child care provider with a mixed-age group or how we plan to use it; in the evening, weekends and school vacations. I suggest you try one theme and explore it for yourself.
|
AuthorSheila Anderson has over 25 years experience in the Early Childhood Field and still loves going to "school" everyday. Archives
January 2022
Categories |