Search results matching tags 'preschool' and 'centers'

Valentine’s Day party in preschool

Anonymous — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 21:36:33 GMT

We made the heart handprints, and they turned out wonderfully. We started making them on Monday, but even the ones we did Tuesday dried quickly enough to be able to write down the children’s quotes for their mothers, and send them home that day. I used cardstock for the paper, which made the handprints look nicer, I think. I had a plate of pink paint, and one of red, and used a wide paintbrush to paint the children’s hands. One hand was pink, then I held the hand to make a print with it (I figured letting the kids do it alone would result in lots of smudging), and then I painted the other hand red and did the same thing. For the quotes, I wrote little hearts between the sentences instead of using periods.

During the party, one table was set up with laminated cards for sorting candy hearts by color. After the kids sorted the hearts, they got to eat them. Yum!

At one table we used heart stamps that I bought from Oriental Trading to dip into white paint for stamping. When the red strips were dry, we used them to make hats for everyone.

At another center, we used cut-up straws as beads, and hole-punched paper hearts twice to string necklaces.

triumph in the block corner

Anonymous — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 00:50:16 GMT

Almost every day, I have been sitting in the block corner at centers time with my little blocks-challenged friend. (On the days when I haven’t been there with him, my special ed teacher has been.) And each day, he has learned a little bit more. Let’s call him Crow, because yesterday, crow is what he did.

“Teacher, let’s make a train!”

“Okay, that’s a good idea. What are you going to do with those blocks in your hands?”

“Make a train! Yeah, make a train!”

“Okay, honey. Put the blocks down on the floor, yes, just like that.”

“This one goes here!”

“And I’ll put this one here. Do you want to go get some more blocks?” And so on.

Pretty soon we had a train. Crow could not stop grinning. ”My train! It’s a train!” And jumping for joy. ”I made a train! I love my train! I love Mrs. X.!”

After a while, it became clear that he didn’t know what to do, having built the train. (Knocking it down and starting over would have been stressful.) So we carefully took it apart, block by block, and Crow managed to put them all away in the right places. Then he went off to the dramatic play area, his second most favorite thing to do.

Today he came in uncharacteristically quiet. My assistant, who goes to get him off his bus each morning, was worried. Usually he chatters all the way to class, but today he was silent. I asked him if he wanted to sit on my lap, and he nodded. So we had a little snuggle, and a conversation about what we had each eaten for breakfast. After that, he was his usual self, except for the fact that he wanted to sit on my lap at least two more times, and before today, he had never been affectionate toward me.

At centers time, I rigged it so that he got to go to blocks again, and once again, he built a train. It was joyful, all over again. He was so proud of himself, and so happy that his teacher was proud, too.

we are on a roll

Anonymous — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 23:18:16 GMT

Last year I felt frustrated about my low increase in scores on vocabulary, so I started making vocabulary cards, using Google Images. (I make two for each word, so that they get used to seeing different images of the same thing for each word.) So far this year we have introduced one vocabulary word each day. Some of our words so far: dolphin, sea horse, zebra, snake….This month we are learning about Fall (and Firefighters), so our words have been leaves, fall, and autumn (the photos for fall and autumn were identical, as they mean the same thing). We will soon be learning apple, acorn, pumpkin, and scarecrow.

The kids love the cards, and are proud to show off the words they know. (I mentioned that 16 of my 20 kids speak English as a second language, right?) In addition to the vocabulary words, we have been learning the colors, with one color celebrated each week. This week was yellow week, and on the Wednesday of each color week, we all wear the special color. I looked fetching in my husband’s oversized yellow polo shirt. I looked particularly fashionable when I topped it off with a crazy yellow crown I made at morning meeting, to inspire the kids to choose the art center today. It worked — pretty soon the room was full of kids with crazy yellow crowns.

So, we know new vocabulary words, and we all know red, blue, and yellow. What else? Well, last week we started learning a letter of the week (I know, I know, many people don’t do that), and so far we know the names and letter sounds for Ss and Oo. The kids practically fizz with excitement about showing me how they know the letter sounds, using the hand motions I taught them.

And the mornings are going smoothly; they know how to listen, how to follow directions, how to take turns, how to clean up, how to line up, and so on. They don’t always do those things perfectly, but they are lovely little citizens all the same.

Phew! One month in, things are looking up. I’m so glad I’m here, and not back there.

Counting to three

Anonymous — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 01:06:13 GMT

You would think that wouldn’t be so hard, right? I mean, this class counts the days of the month, every day, in English and in Spanish. They count the days we’ve been in school, every day. Okay, so lately I’ve been lazy and we’ve been counting by tens to 80, and then by ones after that (it takes a long time for this class to count to 80). But we do count, every single *** day.

As I mentioned, Monkey can’t count to two, let alone three. He’s a special case, so I’m not going to beat myself up about that. But several other kids were having trouble with it yesterday and today, and it is blowing my mind and bumming me out.

There is a boy in my class whose mom likes to dress him in really preppy clothes; he turns up each day all crisp and cute in a colorful polo shirt, ironed jeans, and bright white tennies. He loves to play games; if the Matching Game were high-stakes poker, he’d be rich. Let’s call this boy Squirrel; he’s quick and smart and tricky. Squirrel and two other boys sat down at the games table with me at centers time yesterday to play a makeshift board game I will call “Count to Three!”

I set out plastic color tiles in a long meandering path across the table, gave each of us a plastic teddy bear counter in a different color, and got out my number cube. We started at one end of the path, took turns rolling the cube (which had only the numbers 1, 2, and 3 on it), and moved our bears as many spaces as the number said.

This was much harder said than done. Repeatedly, one of the children would roll a 3, crow “three!” excitedly, and then move their bear two spaces. Or roll a 2 and move ahead one space. Or they would count the space they were already on, or they wouldn’t count the tiles that already had a bear on them…

Squirrel alone could do it. However, his luck ran out and he rolled mostly ones. Since he could tell he wouldn’t win, he gave up halfway through and moved to the writing center, leaving me to ponder how I could have failed so miserably in the simple job of teaching all my students to count to three.

house corner is always exciting

Anonymous — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 19:58:12 GMT

During centers today I wanted to listen in on the interactions of the maybe-on-the-spectrum child in the house corner, so I sat at the adjacent art center and listened in. Then I pulled closer and asked some questions.

Mrs. X: Who are you? What are you doing with the food in the corner?

Child A: I’m the cat. I’m storing food.

Mrs. X: How about you?

Raspberry: I’m the mom.

Mrs. X: And who are you?

Child B: I’m the random homeless guy.

*************

(Child B later explained, “there was a flood, so I had to run away from it, so I ran into their house, and I made them watch tv, so they could see the flood, and they’d understand.”)

Later, I found Raspberry and Cherry under the table, with a baby doll. “Hi guys, ” I said. “Whatcha doing?” “We’re hiding from the flood,” they said.

Over in the corner, Child A and Child B were behind a barrier of cradles and chairs and lots of food. “What are you guys doing over here?” I asked. “We’re hiding from the flood,” they answered. “See, we built a wall so the water can’t get in.”

************

A few minutes later, I returned to the house corner. Cherry had a pillow under her shirt. “Cherry’s having a baby!” they all exclaimed. We had a pregnant teacher visiting the room that day, so I can see where that idea came from.

More about what we do all day

Anonymous — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 23:59:29 GMT

In the comments for my last post, jwg said:

I’m curious. Are there art materials available for the kids who don’t want to color in the lines? Are there other math materials in the math center or do they have to do the project? Is there sand or water play? Can they chose to write about something other than Under the Sea? Is there a Dramatic Play area where the kids choose the script? I think you see where I’m headed here. As you decribe your day it sounds as if the children have choices of where to go, but few choices of what to do when they get there. I hope I missed something.

Here’s my reply:

Point taken. You didn’t miss anything, because I missed some things. Here’s what was missing:

The art center has a specific activity about every other day, and on other days all the materials (large scraps, small scraps, ribbons, hole punches, stickers, glue, scissors, markers, crayons, etc.) are available for the children to do whatever kind of art they’d like. Some of the kids in my class are thrilled to color pictures, and I offer that kind of activity for them from time to time. The ones who want to draw when the art center is booked for something else usually go to the writing center, which is always open for free exploration, even if there is a specific activity being offered there. (The writing center has pencils, crayons, markers, colored pencils, envelopes, several different kinds of paper, and little blank booklets in addition to alphabet magnets and whiteboards.) They can write about whatever they’d like to, but usually are interested in the theme. We have a big pocket chart with word and picture cards for the theme, and the children like to use them to draw pictures and write words in their journals, or at the writing center during centers time. Today Pumpkin took a blank booklet and made a book with pictures of a princess, a whale, an octopus, and a tuna fish who was a bad guy, complete with pretend writing. It was awesome.

The house corner is always open, and is usually just a house, although sometimes I change it to go with the theme. (We’ve had a bear cave and a pizza restaurant, for example.) The sand table is always available, and blocks are almost always open. Sometimes instead of blocks we’ll have the train set or a big tub of Duplos in blocks instead of our wood blocks.

The math center is like the art center — it has a specific, directed activity (usually taken from the curriculum, but sometimes teacher-created) about every other day. On the alternate days, the kids can choose. We have two separate bookshelves full of math manipulatives. I find, however, that the kids like the math center better when there is something new or a special activity. They spent a lot of time doing free exploration of the manipulatives in September and October, and they’re kind of over it.

So there’s the missing information about our centers time. I will say this, however — I do not have a 100% child-centered classroom. That’s probably obvious by now to any regular reader. This is a conscious choice on my part: I think a completely child-centered classroom can be a terrific place for learning, but while it is possible to do it well, it’s also very difficult. The 100% child-centered classroom doesn’t fit my personality or my teaching style, and I think that there is some value in having some of the morning be teacher-directed. I’ve got more to say on that subject, but think I will save it for another post.

snapshots of the day

Anonymous — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:35:19 GMT

*Cherry and Chutney got bus write-ups last week that showed up in my mailbox only this morning. They were defiant to the bus driver and refused to sit down on the bus. And Cherry called Chutney the B word.

*Plum showed up after two days at home and burst into tears. “What’s wrong, honey?” “I…want…my…DADDY!” she sobbed. She sobbed all the way to the local library, so, for the first hour of the morning. At the library she sat on Miss Slinger’s lap whimpering, and then fell asleep in her arms. I spent most of story time trying to track down her parents, who finally showed up when we were back at school.

*I got a new student, who moved to my class from the afternoon class. She knows Miss Slinger, and the room, but not me. She was dressed in a t-shirt and a thin sweatshirt today, and it was very cold out (in the 30s). I tried to give her a jacket to wear to the library, but she refused. I gave her a partner to hold hands with, and she refused. So she held my hand all the way there. Miss Mellow told me later that the new girl is very moody, that mom didn’t show up for her parent conference — twice — and that the girl came to school once with a warm jacket, and not again since.

*Because of very poor test scores, the third through fifth grade teams were shaken up, and a few teachers were removed from classroom teaching (they will be doing supplemental teaching instead). At least one teacher was in tears. Emotions were running high. I wish the Prince had done this back in June, but I think he did the right thing, better late than never. It’s inexcusable when certain teachers’ students don’t make a year’s worth of progress. Our students are so far behind they really need to make well more than a year’s progress. Less than a year? Shameful.

*We read Knuffle Bunny for the second time (I’m back to doing Repeated Interactive Readalouds), and at the end, I asked, “have you ever lost something?” After we heard about a lost ball and a lost car, I told them about a time when I lost my favorite mittens. Pumpkin looked very concerned. He raised his hand. “Teacher, I can give you my red mittens. Let me go get them for you.” And he was about to get up before I stopped him, and assured him that I have since replaced the lost mittens. He tried again at dismissal time to give me his red mittens. So sweet.

*Zucchini had so much fun at recess that he forgot to tell me he needed to go pee. He had a change of clothes in his backpack — but the pants were shorts! So the poor kid went home in a warm jacket, hat, mittens, boots….and shorts.

*I visited Miss Mellow’s class, with her okay, to talk to them about all the stuff in the room, and how most of it is stuff I paid for. I talked to them about respecting books, and how to take care of them, and where to put them (the Mo Willems books go in the Mo Willems box, not the ABC box, and the farm books go on the shelf, not in the color box). I also showed them how to clean up the house corner and where everything goes there. Later Miss Slinger told me that they did a much better job of clean up after their centers time.

*I spent two hours finishing writing up a post-observation report. It made me cranky. I don’t think I want to be a mentor next year.

pumpkin’s communication issues

Anonymous — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 20:39:06 GMT

So I saw Pumpkin’s early childhood screening, and it was very interesting. To the question, “which is bigger, a house or a ball?” he answered, “ball.” (He does that fairly frequently — he repeats the last thing you said if he doesn’t otherwise know what to say.) To the question, “what’s this?” (pointing to chin), he answered, “armpit.”

Today I started his portfolio assessment (I’ve got parent conferences next week), and found that he does, after all, know most of his colors. He also knows three whole capital letters, and recognized a few shapes and one or two numbers. But when I asked, “what is your first name?” he answered, “four.”

It occurs to me that not only does this child really not understand the concept of listening, he doesn’t understand the whole concept of questioning. You know, someone asks a question, and you answer it, and the answer makes some sort of logical sense. His response to “when is your birthday?” was “people give me presents,” so at least he was on topic, and he knows that when I say something, he’s supposed to say something back. But he doesn’t know that a question requires an answer, and he doesn’t know when he doesn’t know the answer. I tried to prompt him — “if you don’t know, that’s okay, just say ‘I don’t know’” — but that got me nowhere.

In blocks today he was very excited to check out the cardboard brick blocks for the first time. He required several interventions from me, because he was so excited he was kicking blocks across the floor, and knocking down other people’s buildings. I explained to him that “blocks are for building,” and that in the block corner there is no kicking, and no knocking down other people’s creations without their permission. I told him that if he did one of those things again, he’d have to leave the block corner.

So a few minutes later he kicked some blocks and I said, “okay, that’s it, you need to leave blocks now.”

The next minute I looked and he was nowhere in the room.

“Miss Slinger, have you seen Pumpkin?” I asked.

“No,” she said, looking around with concern.

I had an idea, and went out to the hall, where I found a very sad Pumpkin waiting by his cubby, with his backpack on.

He didn’t think he had to leave blocks, he thought he had to leave school!

Poor baby. But this morning I grabbed our speech pathologist and asked her to hang out with my little Pumpkin and tell me what she thinks.

bear cave

Anonymous — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 19:46:45 GMT

We had a happy day today. It was a nice change.

The children have been a little wild, a little off for a while now, and I’ve been exhausted. I don’t know which comes first, the chicken or the egg, but I’m going to the doctor on Wednesday to talk about my chronic tiredness.

On Friday I went home after a morning of conferences so tired I could hardly drive. I took an hour and a half nap, which was great, but this was after having slept 9 hours the night before! Anyway, for whatever reason, I’ve been very tired, and it may be affecting the kids’ behavior to have a teacher who is not 100% on top of her game. On the other hand, maybe it’s their wild behavior that is wearing me out….

But back to happiness. And bears. Today was our first day learning about Bears, and I’d had this inspiration that we should turn our dramatic play center into a bear cave. It was up to Miss Slinger and our volunteer from the university to put my idea into action. While the kids were at music, the two of them crinkled, cut, and taped big sheets of paper, and we ended up with a terrific bear cave.

The children were so happy when they got back to the room, and our centers time was really fun. We had bears growling and catching fish in the bear cave, I played bear concentration with the two Lolas and Ferdinand (Lola 2 won the first few games, while Lola 1 watched silently, and then Lola 1 started winning every game after that), Miss Slinger had Leo and some other kids painting pictures of bears with watercolors in the art center, my volunteer did a counting bears activity in the math center, and Harold read books about bears in the reading corner.

The only sad moment was at clean up, when Ruby took the book she was making at the writing center over to the bear cave, and Harold, who had moved to the bear cave at that point, growled at her and BIT her book. Ruby’s face crumpled in tears — “there’s a WET spot!” she told Miss Slinger — so I reached out my arms and Ruby collapsed against my shoulder and cried very quietly.

It was still a good day.

when things don’t go well, i blame myself

Anonymous — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 19:45:11 GMT

Actually, things went okay today, on this, our eighth day of school.

On Friday I passed out the Friday folders to the children as I was lining them up to go out in the hall to get their jackets for recess. They started opening their folders, dropping their papers on the floor, and chatting with each other, and I had a really hard time getting them out to the cubbies, getting them to put their folders away in their backpacks, and then getting them in their jackets and back in line to go outside.

I raised my voice a few times.

When we got outside and the children were playing, I told Miss Nelson, “well, I screwed that up.” She was really nice about it but I could tell she agreed with me that I should have told the children what to do (or not to do) with their folders, before handing them out.

I chatted with our Friday volunteer, a senior in college who hopes to teach Spanish someday, and asked him, “did you see what I did wrong?” He looked startled, so I explained that if something goes wrong in a classroom, it’s often the teacher’s fault. I try to look back and figure out what went wrong, and what I should do differently next time.

I didn’t feel terrible, however, and I had a very nice, relaxing weekend.

So, on to today. It was better, but I just had a hard time recognizing that or being able to relax. I started my day with technological problems, and a request from a 2nd grade teacher to do a Fountas & Pinnell benchmark reading assessment with one of her students, and I realized that I hadn’t finished my weekly lesson plan or gotten my room ready or switched out the books on the shelf. I also found out that I have three new students, one of whom would be arriving in 30 minutes. So I really had to scramble, and when I opened the door to the classroom at 9:30 to greet my students, I felt like I had been in triage mode. Only the most important stuff got done.

Nan didn’t show up, so I figured she had arrived with just enough time to greet our special ed students off their buses. That’s fine, but it meant I didn’t get to touch base with her before the children arrived, which is what I prefer.

I was on my own, and had to greet the children, help them find their cubbies, remind them to get their Friday folders out of their backpacks, give stickers to the ones who remembered, greet my new girl, remind everyone to sign in and move their nametags (from “who’s not here?” to “who’s here?”), and show the whole class how to draw or write in their journal for the first time. I ended up begging another teacher to help me for five minutes, which she did, thank goodness.

On the bright side, they soon went off to Gym and I had a little time to myself (I inhaled a cookie) to get more things done, and then I went off to assess the second grader, in my role as a mentor teacher, helping other teachers with our new reading program. He didn’t do all that well, so now I have to go back tomorrow and try again with a lower level assessment. Then the children returned and we had a pretty nice morning meeting. Our first time doing centers where they get to decide where to go (using clothespins with their names on them to clip to the centers time pocket chart) went surprisingly well. I vaguely remember that last year’s class took weeks to figure it out, and these guys seemed to figure it out on the first day.

David had a really good day, and then, alas, at blocks he accidentally knocked over Leo’s building, so Leo hit him, and David punched him in the chest really hard before Nan could react. Thankfully Leo handled it quite calmly, and Nan was able to get both boys to take time outs. (I emailed Leo’s mom to tell her what happened; I hope she doesn’t freak out.)

Then I read Knuffle Bunny for the first time, using the Repeated Interactive Readaloud method, and it went pretty well. Only David and a cute spacey girl we’ll call Trixie (after the main character in Knuffle Bunny) and a few other children were able to answer questions or participate in the discussion, but that’s okay. It’s early yet.

We had a hard time getting ready for recess, so when we got out there and I checked my watch I realized with a sinking feeling that we had only two minutes left before we had to go inside. Yes, this would count as one of those things that was my fault. What kind of teacher gives her class two minutes for recess?

So when I blew my whistle to line up, two little non-English speaking girls looked right at me, and then ran away to keep playing. Several other classes were outside at this point, and no matter how often I blew my whistle, the two girls would not line up. In fact, they had vanished into the crowd. I had the rest of the class in line heading toward the school, but David looked like he was about to lose it, and Max started pushing, and I could see Nan fruitlessly searching the playground. Finally I told the class to stay where they were and ran to the playground, where I found the girls and yelled at them.

Yuck. I still feel bad about that. What kind of teacher yells at her students at all, let alone on the 8th day of school?! I regretted it instantly.

We managed to get inside without David punching anyone, although Max was yelling, and I found a Spanish-speaking assistant to talk to my two little recess runaways, and I managed to get everyone on the bus or handed over to a parent.

I’m home now, but I felt a little twinge of anxiety not long ago. I haven’t had trouble with anxiety for months, and I really don’t want it to come back now. I’m trying to breathe, deep breathing, keep breathing…..I need to be ready for tomorrow.