Happy New School Year! We are loving our new class and we are all getting to know each other. We are doing a lot of fun things so check in often and see what's up with everyone.
I try really hard to get pictures of as many activities as I possibly can and provide explanations about why we do the things we do as well. So, on that note, let me explain that we try very hard to promote self-help skills in the children we serve. They are perfectly capable of serving themselves food, pouring drinks, getting the things they need, changing their own clothes in case of spills, etc., and generally just doing things for themselves. The "rule" in EE5 is, you need to try to do it yourself, then if you need help a grownup will help you.
We provide many sensory experiences for the children every day. We use a large mirror for building to get a different perspective on building (here we used different sized cubes, but we also use legos, shapes, letters, anything else we think of).
We have a light table that gets a lot of use in our classroom as well. We have a lot of translucent manipulatives for the kids to use with it, but generally everything in our classroom finds its way to the light table.
Of course, we provide the standard sensory experiences...shaving cream, water, sand, play dough, slime, mud, shells and tons of other things. This is very relaxing for our friends.
Friends play with legos nearly every day. This is so great for their fine motor skills, which can only help with prewriting skills.
We like to take our artwork outside if we can.
If it's raining, we don't really see that as a reason to stay in! As long as there is no thunder and lightning, we can stay outside. So what if we get wet. We can change.
We started our first project this week...APPLES! The kids know about apples, and we can learn a lot. We started with a chart of what we already know about them. As we learned new information, we added it in a different color so we can see the actual learning happening.
We played some games with apples, counting, sorting, patterning, adding, subtracting and just manipulating the counters in all kinds of ways.
We made apple pie play dough, which SMELLS like apple pie, but does NOT taste good!
We had an apple taste test with a lot of different kinds of apples. We tasted them all and chose our favorites, then wrote our names on post its and added them to the chart under our favorite apple. Then we counted which had the most favorites, which had the least and which were in the middle.
We did apple stamping, using real apples.
We did an experiment to find out if apples sink or float. Each child made a prediction after handling the apples to see if they were heavy or light. Then they put them in the water to see if their prediction was correct.
Please let me know if you would like to see anything in particular in the blog and let aunts, uncles, grandparents and everyone else know to check it out. There is a translate button at the upper right if anyone needs that! Have a wonderful day and let us know what you think.
