Preschool

How do your children learn how to learn? Well, this is a silly question, because your children are naturally curious and filled with wonder about the world around them. Not to mention very smart!

What we teachers do is to provide some structure and guidance to help that curiosity to take shape in the context of developmental milestones. On our many walks outside through the woods, to the pond and by the stream, children have observed, felt, heard, discussed, sorted, classified, compared and counted the trees, rocks, leaves, weather patterns, acorns and pine cones. As we have emphasized, we build on higher thinking strategies of hypothesizing, analyzing, and synthesizing. This involves open-ended inquiry and goes beyond fact-based, knowledge learning. Once they have these strategies they can apply them to all learning.

Likewise, our investigation of worms is not just learning about worms. We are learning how to learn and learning how to shape our natural curiosity with specific strategies that can be applied for learning about anything! At BCD we believe that building multilevel connections in a young mind is essential. One way, one answer, filling-in-the-blanks thinking does not open up the pathways necessary for innovative thinking in today’s world. You, our wonderful parents, know this instinctively which is one of the many reasons you chose BCD in the first place!

Last week we were introduced to our worm visitors by observing them, touching and holding them and talking about our reactions to them. This week we continued our worm investigations in several ways. Your children began individual observation journals. We write their comments, their observations and their questions and they draw what they see. We have also introduced the KWL strategy. K – What do you know (about a topic)? W – What do you want to know? and L – What have you learned?

We do this to help children be mindful of their learning and to give a framework to their ongoing investigations. We introduced the K and W of worms parts.

We Know –

They don’t like sunlight because the oils come off. Aidan

They don’t have legs. Sonya

They don’t have eyes. Sophie

We Want to know –

Which weather do they like? Sonya

What is their favorite thing to eat? Aidan

Why do they eat leaves? Isabelle

Why do they eat dry stuff? Noelle

Do they like sunshine? Neha

Other circle time conversations this week included discussions about feelings, manners and accidents and how we handle our own feelings and those of others.

We continue to have a dictionary page and book writing center where we are working on letter formation. We can be very imaginative here, too as Neha’s Bb page sentence illustrates: “My butterfly was tangled up and the wings fell off.”

We also had centers with Kinetic sand, puzzles, a house-keeping area, silk scarves and the light table. These centers, too, build on essential skills. Working with sand and puzzles helps develop small-motor skills, including strength and coordination. Of course children are also building on language and social interaction skills. Overheard at the light table; “I made a leaf, too!” “I made pink.” “I put the scarf over the buttons/red chips on the light table.”

In our ongoing investigation of color we began painting with blue and red and discovered it can turn into a brownish color, purple and dark, dark purple. Learning about colors and hues is not just scientific investigation. Children are building on their prewriting skills by holding and manipulating paint brushes, they are developing their higher order executive skills of planning, executing, refining, and finishing a project and they are using symbolic transformative thinking skills when they paint an idea.

Thank you, Yulia for our lunch bunch this week! We had a delicious soup/bread, fruit salad, and mini eclairs.

“The snow came out!’ exclaimed Abigail when she arrived on Friday morning. We had fun sledding and making a snowman, a joint effort among some of our girls and one kindergarten girl who used a carrot from her lunch as a nose and some apples for eyes. We love to work together and to repurpose things in preschool!

Lastly, we leave you with a quote by one of our students regarding his/her creation. Although stated by one child, we feel it sums up what all your children feel, “I wanted to impress my

Thank you all for coming in for our parent/teacher conferences. Communication is an important component as we are all working together in the best interests of your children. We value your insights and concerns, and appreciate your positive feedback.

In addition to our important center and circle learning and routines we introduced some new and exciting investigations this week. We continued with our color investigation, this week introducing yellow and red. Sophie explained, “I mixed red and yellow to make orange.” Aidan extended our investigation by using red and orange blocks to make a pattern. Our light table provided new avenues of investigation and opportunities for hypothesizing and “what if…?” thinking. Questions such as, “What happens if we put different colored (red, blue and yellow) transparent squares and triangles on our light table?” “What do you think will happen if we put a red on top of a yellow?” and so forth. Children were also excited to experiment with scarves, and some have discovered how neat it is to trace things using the light table. All of these investigations, in addition to being fun and informative, help children to master important thinking strategies. Our teacher-guided questions model these strategies and give form and structure for these essential higher-order skills. Your children are already responding in many creative ways to changes in color, form, and motion. We are building a light and color vocabulary using descriptive words as well as transforming our thinking in painting. We are integrating our investigations with language, math, science and social studies! We have even made connections and have studied the colors in French!

Another very exciting thing happened in our classroom this week in the form of wiggly visitors. Ms. S brought in wriggle worms from her compost at home. We put them in a clear container on the table with some compost. Your children were invited to wet their hands and hold the worms. “What do they feel like?” “What do they sound like?” Noelle captured the excitement by exclaiming, “Holy Moly!” Noelle said, “It tickles!” Angeliz wondered, “Do they have teeth?” Neha got down and personal with one of the worms, asking it, “Do you want to pet the carrot?” CJ loved listening to the worm book. Angeliz summed up what we all felt by stating, “They are wiggly!” Our worm visitors were a highlight of our day on Tuesday and were the favorite part of the day for Isabelle and Sonya! We have “invited” the worms to spend more time with us. As with all of our investigations we will be learning not just about worms but will learn how to learn engaging all of our senses (well, maybe not taste!) and using higher thinking strategies.

For those of you viewing this blog on your iphone or ipad, you can view the pictures here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bcdtech/sets/72157647254977052/