You can see it on their face. "What IS that?" Eyebrows raised, then they silently avert their eyes, hoping you didn't just see their expression. It's OK. I am used to seeing those reactions from parents and other visitors to our room when they first look at the latest art display in our classroom. It is a natural reaction. You want to make a positive comment or ask your child a question about their work. If you have no idea what in the world IT is, however, what can you say? What may look like scribbles, strokes of paint across the paper or some odd-dimensional piece is a masterpiece created with far more brainpower than a cookie-cutter craft. In our program at St. Mary Preschool, the majority of our art experiences are those included in our Experience Preschool with Mother Goose Time curriculum. They are largely Reggio-inspired, with a beautiful full-color photograph and conversation prompts that the teacher may use. A variety of materials are available: usually markers or paint, natural items such as sticks and leaves, dimensional pieces such as small cups, noodles, etc. along with glue, scissors and so on. Mrs. Grady, our afternoon assistant, prepares the art table after school for the next day's project. Mrs. Plamondon then guides the process in the morning. Art is one of the many choices available during the 75 minute block of uninterrupted play. And it always relates to the monthly, weekly and daily theme. While the child is having an engaging conversation with a familiar and caring teacher, they are using higher-level thinking skills. They are sharing prior experiences (language, memory recall), gaining new knowledge (vocabulary) and developing small muscle skills. Famous artists are quite often featured, such as this tree by Wassily Kandinsky, so their cultural awareness is increased as well.
One of my favorite aspects of this art experience is the relationships that develop between teacher and child. Mrs. Plamondon will help the children relate this project to our current theme, ask questions and quietly listen before commenting. There is laughter, smiles, concentrating faces. Some of the questions that were asked during this Kandinsky Tree experience:
The children are learning self-discipline as well. They are seated at the table, hands in lap, then the discussion begins. The supplies and materials are then made available. Children are allowed time to think of a plan and carry it out. In our monthly Experience Preschool with Mother Goose Time curriculum kit, are small notes to share with parents. We usually staple the note to the art project. It provides a brief explanation of the activity as well as questions the parent may want to ask their child. We have received wonderful feedback from the parents regarding these notes. I appreciate that I don't have to create them every month and yet have an easy way to connect with families. Here are some more resources re: Process Art and Reggio Emilia: www.naeyc.org/resources/pubs/tyc/feb2014/process-art-experiences https://www.naeyc.org/resources/pubs/yc/nov2015/emergent-curriculum https://childdiscoverycenter.org/non-traditional-classroom/what-is-the-reggio-emilia-approach/ If you are not already using process-based art in your classroom, I encourage you to explore it further. It can be scary to branch out or change. It is possible to become aware of different philosophies and slowly integrate new ideas into your program. You may just embark on a wonderful journey at the same time.
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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.
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.
Preschoolers are known for asking many questions in a day and the preschool teaching team at St. Mary Preschool ask just as many questions! Why? We want to encourage higher level thinking skills. We want children to become problem-solvers and we want children to think beyond the obvious. This "mental exercise" will prepare children to to do well across all learning domains (our curriculum has 33 skills that span 7 learning domains). Today's preschoolers are the future workforce and although we do not know what type of jobs will be in demand, we know that workers will need to be innovative, which requires "out-of-the-box" thinking. During our "Down on the Farm" theme, children had the opportunity to make baby chicks during an Invitation to Create experience at the art table where Mrs. Plamondon was there to provide a little background information, determine what the children may already know about chicks and ask open-ended questions. At another table, they could then build a nest for their chick. I was close by to ask "biq" questions such as, "What will you use for the base of your nest?" "What materials will you line your nest with?" "Will your chick live alone or with other chicks?" I absolutely love how our preschool curriculum provides sample questions to ask as well as guidance we can provide while children are exploring the materials prior to the real "lesson." Certainly I am capable of coming up with own questions and quite often I do. However, there are days where I really welcome the suggestions! During our Mud Pie activity, children explored dry soil, then added water and explored the new texture. Mrs. Plamondon asked many questions throughout the process. Once the mud was made, children chose natural materials to decorate their pie with. Some children enjoyed the sensory experience, while others were curious but not so sure they liked the feeling of wet mud in their hands. Experience Preschool with Mother Goose Time provides weekly lesson plans that play off the larger monthly theme. Teachers can use the daily lessons as a starting point however and expand it based on the interest of the children. The tractor activity was extended over the course of a few days as it was widely popular. I was thrilled as it involved not only engineering wheels but ramps, too! (science geek here). Children made several wheels and "raced" their friends. They experimented with different ramps and it was exciting to hear their reasoning behind why they made the ramp a certain way or even in how they positioned the wheel on the ramp. One of our children decided to put a "plow" on the front of our toy tractor. The plow was actually a small construction cone. How very clever! I hope you were able to get a few ideas for your own preschool weekly lesson plans. If you like to save time and have most of the materials packaged into daily bags, please consider checking out Experience Preschool (formerly Mother Goose Time). Thank you for following along with our learning journey.
Community Challenge, EXTENDEDWe start our group time with a Community Challenge that relates to our daily/weekly theme. Our preschool teacher lesson plan book has a suggested community challenge each day and the children look forward to what we will do together. Here, I highlight the daily topic, Silo during our Down on the Farm monthly preschool theme. I took the oats from our sensory box and told the children we needed to work together to fill the silo. I quickly reviewed the parts of the silo with them as we got into an assembly line. All children had visited the art table earlier that day where they explored a photo of a silo and engaged in a meaningful conversation with Mrs. Plamondon about what silos are used for. Children were then able to create a silo shaker, to be used during music and movement. Once the children were in a line, each child was handed a small cup. I then poured oats into the first child’s cup, who then poured their oats into the cup of the child next to them and so on. The last child in line poured the oats into the “silo.” After two rounds, we looked in the silo. “That was a lot of work! Do you think there is a large or small amount of oats in the silo?” Many were surprised to see only a small amount. That led to a discussion of a good work ethic and why its important that everyone helps. We continued a few more rounds and checked on our progress. "How long do you think it would take to fill our silo,?" I asked. "All day!" "100 hours!" were just a few of the responses we received. Time for more movement! Children used their silo shakers to dance to an instrumental song on the preschool music CD that is included in our curriculum box. Mrs. Plamondon poured out the difference in sounds among the shakers. Some children used rice in their shakers while others used beans. Math and Literacy: Feed the Animals We break into small groups twice a day to work on school-readiness skills. During this activity, the children used our story magnets and a spinner that were included in our curriculum kit to play a math game. They spun the spinner, then scooped grain from the silo and “fed” the correct animal. I then asked, "Which animal was fed the most?" "Which animal has the least amount of oats?" I appreciate the fact that everything is plotted out for me by Experience Preschool (formerly Mother Goose Time). I don't have to worry if skills are taught in the correct succession, as the scope and sequence are carefully planned out for the entire school year. Community Challenge, extended: The children chose to use buckets in the sand area as silos. They eagerly told me how they cleaned the grains (sand) then dumped them into the silo. If the grains became stuck, they used a shovel or stick (from our discussion with Mrs. Plamondon) to free the grain. It is always so exciting to see how children apply earlier knowledge and conversations to their play later the same day or even many days later. Many teachers use these observations in their approach to what is called and an emergent curriculum. In our program, we use a blended approach. We begin with our monthly preschool curriculum kit and are flexible in our planning. If the children are really excited about a particular daily topic, we may extend it for a day or two. The same is true if we see even one child struggling with an important concept such as patterning. We may revisit an activity a few times, changing it slightly as we go, to ensure that children have enough exposure to the skill and time to practice it.
Thank you for following along on our learning adventure! Kickin’ Off a New Theme: On the FarmThe children in my class have a farm, garden or know someone who does, so this theme is particularly exciting to them. Our school is in a beautiful agricultural area that is also surrounded by lakes, rivers and a National Park that runs along Lake Michigan. On the way to school, our children see vineyards, cherry, apple and peach orchards and glimpses of Lake Leelanau. They play and learn where people vacation! Cooperative games: We played a game during skill time where the children rolled the die, then moved the hen to nearest matching space on the board. Their goal was to work as one team to get the hen to the henhouse before the fox came. Following directions, spatial awareness and working cooperatively with others are all school-readiness skills that were focused on. Don’t Drop the Egg! We played a fun game on “Chicken Day,” of passing an egg around the circle as our theme music played. During Art, we stamped eggs in paint onto black aper. Mrs. Plamondon engaged the children in a conversation about where eggs come from, the parts of an egg and so on. Language skills develop at a faster rate when used in a deeper context t(such as our monthly theme) and with a caring, familiar adult. Writing in Mud We wrote farm words in “mud” during skill time. Counting Pigs: Each month, our curriculum comes with two sets of manipulatives. The children love these little piggies! We counted them, sorted them and used our math cards to indicate the correct number. School readiness skills: one-to-one correspondence, identifying numerals, following directions, sorting/grouping. The month has just begun, so come on back ya’ll to see what is happening on the farm!
Literacy Throughout SeptemberAs a busy director and lead teacher with a family, I appreciate having a month of sequential lesson plans already plotted out for me. I don’t have to spend hours outside of the school day gathering ideas and materials. I can rest assured that our curriculum, www.mothergoosetime.com has everything in order. Here, Mrs. Grady is leading a small group in a literacy activity that involves the entire body and most of the senses. Young children learn best when engaged in this sort of activity as it is how they experience their world. Children are able to make letter-sound-word connections, walk the letter “T” to imprint the parts of the letter in their brain and then create it with hands-on letter pieces. Following directions and working cooperatively with their peers are other skills gained as well. Mrs. Plamondon led an “I Spy” activity that emphasized the letter-sound connection. Small muscles in the hands are prepared for writing by making playdough “snakes” and creating letters. Mrs. Plamondon worked with her small group throughout the month , using the www.mothergoosetime.com I Can Read books. They began with basic concepts of print then progressed to “reading” sight words using picture clues. Once my group became comfortable with this month’s book, I gave them monster fingers to use as pointers. They thought it was so much fun! Thank you for joining us on our adventures in literacy!
How do you emphasize the use of "caring hands" in your learning environment? Here are a few ways we wove this important concept into our daily life in the classroom during our "Family and Pets" theme. Young children need patient, loving adults who will guide them tough situations. When someone has been hurt , we talk about what happened and help children be accountable for their actions. With the assistance of an adult, children learn to say, "I shouldn't have pushed you, do you forgive me?" for example. The child who was hurt, learns to say, "I forgive you." Sometimes a child isn't ready to forgive, so we patiently walk them through how to handle those big feelings. "It sounds like he is still really hurt. Let's check back in with him in a little bit." More times than not, a child is ready to forgive right away and only needed an acknowledgement of an injury. Each month, we receive 4 beautiful Teacher Guides and the majority of the materials to do the activities. September's monthly theme was Family and Pets, and the weekly themes were My Family, My Feelings, My Pets and Friendly Traits. During the Friendly Traits week, we spent a day on Care. We practiced caring and encouraging one another through games and activities and even art projects such as the one above. The unique thing about the Mother Goose Time curriculum is that they encourage "big questions" and teacher-child interaction before art materials are even explored. I plan on taking video of my assistant, Mrs. Plamondon who does a stellar job at communicating with the children on the day's subject. She uses the Teacher's Guide as a foundation and then very naturally, continues the discussion with the children. They are able to make observations aloud, answer open-ended questions, share an experience that relates to the project, and finally choose which tools and materials they will use to make the project. Independence and originality is encouraged. Our environment is in a Catholic School, so of course we are going make natural connections between the Mother Goose Time curriculum and a Bible story or principle. During one of our Jesus Time lessons, we watched a video about St. Vincent De Paul and decided that we all have at least one pair of pants that do not fit well and could donate them to the local St. Vicent De Paul Thrift Shop. Well, our families donated BAGS of items! Follow us for more ideas on how topics and themes are explored in a deep and meaningful way in our learning environment.
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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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