Festivals and events may be cancelled this summer, however there is treasure to be found at home with your preschooler. Get creative and let Experience Preschool with Mother Goose Time, help.
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We will visit our local beaches this summer, however, if we decide to stay home, we will still have plenty of fun. And I know she is learning, even though she thinks she is just playing with gold coins and sand. Here, I used materials from this month's subscription box from Experience Preschool with Mother Goose Time. I simply added her little tray of Kinetic sand and as we played Counting Treasure, I was able to see which numbers she knew and if she could count items using one-to-one correspondence. Dancing on Alphabet Island played in the background.
You can read here how we kicked off this fun summer theme at home and around our community.
When each Mother Goose Time box arrives, Iris wants to know where the theme poster is because she loves the little magnifying glasses that come with it. There are little prompts on the handles such as, "How many palm trees can you find?" If your child enjoys Seek and Find books or playing I Spy, they will certainly dig the monthly poster. I am amazed by how much her vocabulary has grown just since we stayed home from the "COVID-19 shut down" which makes me appreciate her and our preschool box even more. Amid shut-downs and new rules regarding how we live and work, I have found the very best treasure of all, more time with Iris.
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We are so excited about our Treasure Island curriculum box from Experience Preschool with Mother Goose Time. As much as possible, we plan on taking our activities outdoors. This theme naturally lends itself to outdoor learning, right Matey? We began our week at the beach, looking for treasure and "pirate ships." There are some tall ships (which we call pirate ships) that are available to ride on in our area and we were able to spy one getting ready for the season. We also took a stroll through a marina. Simple experiences like this provide wonderful opportunities to enrich your child's vocabulary and strengthen your relationship as you are spending time together. We talked about docks, anchors, life jackets, sail boats, fishing boats and much more. Iris now has real life experiences with these items and will be able to make connections to them later. At home, we played the theme music that came in our Experience Preschool With Mother Goose Time box. The songs have a real island feel and feature fun sounds like steel drums. One of the games in my Teacher Guide was called Island Hop. I played the CD and Iris hopped from Island to Island (hoola hoops). When the music stopped, she had to freeze, which caused a lot of gigles!. We plan on playing this game with our neighbor friend, too. To provide some background knowledge for Iris, we talked about the Topic Poster that showed a photo of an island and we recalled a few movies we watched recently that featured islands. Included in our monthly curriculum kit, are two books, suggestions for other books relating to the topic and many hands-on games. Click here to view what comes in an Experience Preschool with Mother Goose Time kit. Iris had so much fun playing the game, Number Island. She rolled a die, counted the dots and then found the matching number island floating in the water. She experimented with trying to make the numbers stay at the bottom of the dish tub and was delighted to see them stick to the side of the tub. Of course, we ended up splashing water and having such great fun we needed a change of clothes. When the weather is too warm to play outdoors (or we just need a break from the sun) there are plenty of games we can play indoors such as counting shells. These beautiful number cards, photo and shells were included in our kit. Thanks for coming along on today's adventure! Hope to see you soon.
The late winter, early spring of 2020 is sure to go down in history as one of the most unusual pandemics. Restaurants and businesses shut down and children were sent home to learn. Many parents had to juggle working from home while educating their children. Now that the dust has settled, we have to wonder what effect this will have on our children. As an early childhood educator, I spent hours in webinars this spring, learning about the social-emotional consequences of isolating children from their peers and the world. Brilliant minds are coming together to suggest how we can support children now and when we return to our school buildings. ECE professionals are committed to doing what it takes to make children and their families feel that school can once again be a happy and safe place to learn. What kind of learning gap can we expect, however? Will it be the "COVID-19 Slown Down" or "Slide?" Each fall, teachers are prepared to review last year's material. Some children will need more remedial work than others and many factors come into play. After the COVID-19 shutdown, however, and schools deciding to advance children to the next grade, what can we expect? This article claims students could be behind a full year. Before school let out this year, I hope educators communicated to parents the importance of practicing key skills over the summer. I also hope that parents were supplied with resources for their specific child. There are many wonderful free resources out there and those that cost very little. Most publishers such as Evan-Moor are happy to support parents and provide a discount for workbooks and other resources. I shared one of my favorite resources and a few easy strategies in a recent blog post. What can parents do? Parents can ask their preschool directors and or school administrators what type of plans are in place to support their child, academically, socially, and emotionally. Revised health care plans should be shared with parents also. Over the summer, parents can support their child on the home front and make sure they spend at least 15 minutes a day working on key skills appropriate for their age and grade level. Read, sing, work on puzzles, and explore the community. Provide rich sensory experiences at home through cooking, crafts, or the outdoors, such as hiking or visiting area zoos. Visit farmer's markets, marinas, libraries, whatever your community has to offer. Provide rich experiences which then become background knowledge for future learning. Here in Michigan, Governor Whitmer has announced that in-person learning will occur this fall and the full plan will be released on June 30. In the meantime, my program is preparing for several scenarios. We are expecting to review the basics and move forward as children are ready. Let's all do our part to slow down the learning gaps caused by the COVID-19 shutdown.
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Summer Vacation is here. Yes, we have about 2 1/2 glorious months of summer fun, yet something is happening that you may not even be aware of: Your child is quickly losing knowledge gained during the previous school year. Teachers lovingly refer to the knowledge lost as "Summer Brain Drain." Teachers will spend the first month of school reviewing "old" skills with their students and trying to gauge where each child is at, skill-wise. You can help your child's brain stay sharp however, with just 15 minutes of practice a day. You will be surprised how easy it is to fit in this practice session each day.
Make learning fun for your child and think out of the box. Learning can take place in a house, tent or on the picnic table. Your child (and their teacher) will be less frustrated this fall and your child will have an advantage over their peers. Happy Summer!
Full disclosure: Experience Preschool provides curriculum for my program in exchange for sharing our honest reviews and experiences. There are many ideas out there for preschool lesson plans and activities. So many preschool curriculum choices. Social media is full of inspiring posts and I think most of us have hundreds (if not more) pins on each "board" on Pinterest. It is tempting to want to do them all and yet, our head begins to spin as we try to execute our plans. Let me show you something that will be a total game-changer for you whether you are a homeschool parent, teach in a school building or home program, or teach virtually. Our preschool curriculum of choice at St. Mary Preschool is Experience Preschool from Mother Goose Time. As an early childhood educator, I want to create learning experiences that are rich with language and hands-on activities and provide a deep knowledge base. That is hard to do if we are all over the place in one month, with different, unrelated topics introduced daily. Since the middle of March, I have been meeting with my preschool students online and hosting a virtual Circle Time. I divide the materials from our preschool curriculum kit into packets for each child along with activity sheets and info for their parents. They pick up the materials from a box outside of our school. Then, during our Circle Time session, we will have an interactive discussion about one of the daily/weekly topics, dance to the theme music (included in our kit), review the core concepts of the month and show off recent art projects. I remind the children to use their journal, write their names and use the "I Can Read" books I sent home. Check out everything that comes in one monthly kit here. Side note, I donned a crown while we sang and danced to "Queen Ant," from Dancing with Bugs and Crawly Things CD. My awesome husband created a virtual background for me, which is the lake that our school sits on. We can see the water from the playground and cafeteria. Every month, our preschool curriculum is divided into daily bags, with beautiful topic posters, the majority of the materials needed and learning materials such as games, a journal, or I Can Read book. I have a rolling cart labeled with numbers 1-20 and simply place the bags in each drawer. At the end of the school day, my assistant prepares the art table and I set up STREAM stations for the next day. Complete game-changer for me. I love the fact that I don't have to worry if I am hitting key skills each month and in the correct order. Experience Preschool plans the entire scope and sequence for me. We record observations in our Child Folio app, which allows me to connect state standards to each entry. Parents are able to view their child's private "page and comment in real time. We are also able to track their learning progress and print out reports for parent-teacher conferences. Science is woven into each lesson, the children have opportunities to engineer their own props or toys, express themselves freely through open-ended art projects, listen to stories about the topic, play games that reinforce core concepts, solve big problems through STREAM stations and sing and dance to music that relates to the theme. Remember that "deep learning" I mentioned earlier? That's what I'm talking about!
So if you are tired of spending hours creating lesson plans, buying materials, preparing for the week and dragging that ginormous teacher bag home, you have to check out Experience Preschool. You will be glad to get your weekend back. Themes have gotten a bad wrap in early childhood education in recent years however, there is one curriculum company that has turned what you used to know about "themes" upside down. Experience Preschool with Mother Goose Time takes theme-based learning to a whole new level. A topic is explored deeply and meaningfully through STEAM stations, provocations for learning, child-produced dramatic play props, open-ended art experiences, math games, and early literacy, which is what I will focus on here. Each month, we receive a beautiful storybook that has a corresponding puzzle and magnets. Not shown are the story pieces that I cut out and laminate. The stories are meaningful, full of rich theme-related vocabulary, and have gorgeous illustrations. I place the magnets on a metal cupboard in my classroom, and the children spend a lot of their free time there, reciting the main story or making up their own. Experience Preschool with Mother Goose Time has created a friendship series that comes with story props for group literacy activities, puppets for children to make, and a story journal sheet for even more early literacy opportunities. Our teachers refer back to the character trait from the story in natural ways while interacting with the children daily. Here is another example of how the monthly theme is integrated across all domains, especially early literacy. Every child receives their own "I Can Read" book each month. We use these books during our small group time where one teacher works with the same children every day, twice a day. Concepts of print, sight words, reading comprehension, and "concept of word" are the main early literacy skills we work on at the Pre-K level. The curriculum company produces their own music and dance curriculum DVD's also. The children and teachers love the music, inspired by different genres each month. "Shake Your Tail Feather" is one of our favorites. Again, learning is rich and deep, making logical connections throughout the month.
As an early childhood professional or homeschooling parent, I encourage you to take an honest look at themes again, especially how Experience Preschool with Mother Goose Time does them. School closings are happening rapidly across the country, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Like most teachers, I had to decide in a very short time, how I could support my students learning at home. We use worksheets very sparingly as the majority of our learning takes place manipulating objects (counting blocks, building letters using special hands-on kits, matching objects with their letter sounds) and using our whole body to walk along huge letters on the floor. I prepared some learn-at-home packets the best I could and then got to work planning and preparing for LIVE Circle Time sessions. You can view my first attempts here: facebook.com/kinderhausinmichigan/. I let the parents know the night before our first session what our core concepts are so they could create signs and place them in the room where they would be viewing my live Circle Time from. Just as when we do Circle Time in the classroom, we reviewed our core concepts through movement. For example, our recent theme from Experience Preschool with Mother Goose Time has been On the Pond. Our core concepts involve a daily topic that relates to the weekly and monthly themes, the letters, N, W, and Z, numbers 13 and 14, the color black and the shape is star. We receive cube cards in our curriculum kit each month that can easily be placed in our large cube. I roll the cube and it may direct us to "flap your arms 14 times as if you have dragonfly wings." Or, we may "crawl to something that begins with W." Noting who was on "live" with me, I encouraged them to do the same and then have their adult type in what they did. I also used their names one at a time in a song. Distance learning is unusual for preschoolers, however seeing their teacher, hearing familiar things that we were working on at school and knowing their friends are tuning in also, can provide some much-needed familiarity when life has come to a screeching halt. These short sessions are helping to develop their social-emotional development, which is one of 7 learning domains outlined in the Experience Preschool with Mother Goose Time curriculum. And in a time like this, a child's emotional well-being must be secure for any real learning to take place. Here, a student is using his There Was a Little Turtle song kit we made in class to sing along with me.
At the time of this post, we are scheduled to go back to school after Spring Break, which would be April 6. If school closures are extended, the curriculum company has since devised a way for us to send home learning supplies with our students. Let's hope it doesn't get to that. I miss my students terribly and truly enjoy going to work every day. In the meantime, I will continue to pray for each student by name. I hope you have enjoyed a brief look into what "distance learning" has looked like for my class at St. Mary School. Little Boy Blue Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn. The sheep's in the meadow, the cow's in the corn. Where is the boy who looks after the sheep? He's under the haystack, fast asleep! We explored sheep across all 7 learning domains in the Experience Early Learning curriculum. Who knew there was so much to do with sheep? During the Nursery Rhyme theme, we counted, sang songs, read books, engineered sheep pens and problem solved how to create a sheep collar. We also made sheep puppets and played with "cows in the corn." Below, children worked through story problem cards during skill time, which is when we focus on school-readiness skills. They also played a math game, where they had to identify the number, then place the correct amount of sheep in the meadow. We created our own props too. The children recited the nursery rhyme while playing with their sheep puppet. One of our provocations involved asking the children to design a sheep pen that would prevent the sheep from escaping. They took this task very seriously and engineered some amazing designs. Relationships are key in our program and so I enjoy asking the children to explain their building to me and asked questions to further their cognitive and language skills. "On another day, we posed the following question: Help, the sheep need a bell so we can hear them when they get loose. Can you help?" We placed wooden beads, bells and pipecleaners on a table to see what they would create. One of our sensory experiences were cows in corn. The children had lots of fun with that! I appreciate that there are many ideas like this in the Teacher's Guide that comes in our Experience Early Learning curriculum each month. The children made horns which we used in many games during Circle Time. Listening skills, cooperation and creative development were the goals of this activity. Thank you for coming along with us this month! Soon, we will begin our On the Pond theme from Experience Early Learning. Make it a great day, friends!
We have been counting our way through Nursery Rhymes! The children are naturally drawn to the rhyme and rhythm and so adding movements makes it all the more fun. Each month, we receive a subscription box from Experience Early Learning. It has 4 teacher guides (one for each week) and the materials to complete each lesson. I am not sure who is more excited when the box arrives, me or the children! One week we focused on Counting Rhymes and so we learned Baa, Baa, Black Sheep, Hickory, Dickory, Dock, One, Two, Buckle My Shoe and so on. For Hickory, Dickory Dock Day, I asked our parents if they had broken clocks they wanted to donate to our class. The next day, three clocks for our Fix It Station and one play clock for the Dramatic Play area arrived. We are so blessed to have families who are always willing to support our learning in the classroom. Above, two boys are measuring a clock. We added screwdrivers and a magnifying glass to the Fix It Station also. This became a very popular area for a few days. They had no idea they were learning math and engineering skills while fine-tuning their small muscle skills. In our curriculum box was this fun Hickory, Dickory Dock game. This was perfect for our small group, skill time activity. I worked with four children as they spun the dial, told me the number it landed on and then moved their playing piece the correct number of spaces. I able to document this learning in our Child Folio app as we played. Parents can see their child's learning take place in real-time through the app. The app contains the learning domains, skills and goals for our Experience Early Learning Curriculum, so we can track progress over time. The information gathered influences future lesson plans. Twice a day, we break into skill time groups. This allows us to get to know the children's strengths and areas where they may need more assistance. One teacher is responsible for the same group of children and documenting their learning. Here, Mrs. Plamondon is working with her group. We learned the rhyme, 1,2, Buckle My Shoe earlier that day. During skill time, Mrs. Plamondon's group took turns rolling the die and laying the correct number of sticks in a row. Mrs. Plamondon was able to see if the child could subitize (quickly and confidently identify the number on the die without counting) and then use one-to-one correspondence as they counted the sticks. At Opening Circle, the children recited ”Old Mother Hubbard” then took turns guessing which bowl the dog bone was under. During Skill Time, my small group played ”Old Mother Hubbard.” The child rolled the die, identified the number and then placed a bone over the corresponding number. We played several rounds. ”Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” proved to be fun also. The children were able to were able to make their puppets and then play with them. I made an extra set for classroom use also.
I hope you joined a peek into our classroom where we counted our way through Nursery Rhymes this month. 3 Uses for Leftover MaterialsOur subscription box from Experience Early Learning comes loaded with materials for an entire month worth of lesson plans. We use the majority of the art materials, however, we will have a few pieces leftover from each art activity. I will either add them to our supply boxes or I will make even better use of them, and share them with our families or use them at quiet time. In preschool, everything needs to be repetitive, so having additional opportunities to use the materials and practice core concepts, the better. You can see more about core concepts, here. One way we can do that is by keeping a familiar game in the rotation of materials. I like to use the games that come in our subscription box as arrival activities, or for small groups. The Fawn Spots game that came in our Experience Early Learning kit was a hit! And our kids love to talk about deer all the time, as we see them often in our backyards and on our way to school. The math games that we use during skill time, make great quiet time bags as well! Experience Early Learning curriculum boxes come with two storybooks each month. The main book has a matching sturdy tray puzzle (also included), magnets and postcards. Last month, I decided not to have our students use the postcards. Typically, we have the children draw a picture of something that really stuck out to them from the current theme. We then take dictation and include that on the card before mailing it to their families. I thought it would be fun to place the postcards on a binder ring and use it as a journal of sorts, as the bag travels among our families. So, there you have it. 3 uses for leftover materials. I hope you feel inspired to re-purpose the valuable materials that come in your Experience Early Learning subscription box. each month.
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AuthorSheila Anderson has over 25 years experience in the Early Childhood Field and still loves going to "school" everyday. Archives
January 2022
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