Preschool

Our focus for this week is the Responsive Classroom approach. This national program is an integral part of our Lower School. In our preschool classroom we lay the foundation for what the Lower School site explains are the highlights:

• Morning Meeting
• Classroom Rules
• Interactive Modeling
• Positive Teacher Language
• Logical Consequences
• Guided Discovery
• Academic Choice
• Classroom Organization
• Working with Families
• Collaborative Problem Solving

The first weeks of school are particularly important. By taking the time needed to build on a solid social foundation during the first weeks, we help children build a sense of community while developing a sense of autonomy. Children participate in developing guidelines, they learn routines and responsibilities, and they see how learning is interconnected. Participating in developing and learning the structure of routines helps children develop the sense of security, confidence and self-regulation necessary for learning.

Each day we have a morning meeting. The structure is the same; we all sit in a circle. We keep this to just a few minutes and focus on the essentials – a greeting that includes every child by name, roll call, our daily schedule so children know what to expect, and a review of our jobs so we all take collective responsibility for our classroom.

What varies from day to day is how we greet one another. This week, for example, we learned our greeting in French, and the children chose to say, “Hi-dee-ho” in front of each name! We love seeing smiles and giggles accompanying greetings. We are gradually introducing jobs and have a door holder, attendance helper, calendar helper and weather helper.

We always eat lunch together, and use this time to enjoy one another’s company and have pleasant conversation. Variations this week have included eating with the 9^th graders, and eating outside with our Kindergarten friends.

This week had a rich array of activities and investigations. We have read many interesting books which relate to our activities, including Silvester and the Magic Pebble (our stones of many shapes and colors,) Bear Hunt (Teddy Bear Day,) The Peace Book and The Feelings Book (learning about ourselves, how we interact in a community, and finding words to express how we feel,) The Boing Boing Book (for fun, and to introduce sounds,) Babar the King (living in and contributing to a community,) and Gilberto and the Wind (experiencing the many moods of the winds and breezes.)

We have continued our long-term project making nature catchers focusing this week on walking on our many nature trails and gathering twigs, leaves, feathers, pebbles, acorns and flowers. Each excursion has offered physical and social benefits, as well, including fresh air, holding hands, assisting one another, meeting up with other students and lots of discussion about where to go and what to choose. We also stop to marvel. We think we saw a raccoon on Wednesday! We also saw what we think are great blue heron tracks at the pond. Can you find the beautiful spider web we saw in the photo?

Our rainy Tuesday kept us indoors (please outfit your child with rain gear so we can go outside, too!) This led to integrated language arts, math and science observations of our stones. We classified them by size, shape, color and texture, all the while finding words to describe our observations.

This also led to a new project, an investigation of leaves. We gathered, sorted and talked about leaves, and we explored many ways to represent them. We pasted leaves, made cutouts of leaves, did leaf rubbings and drew our own creations. Our outdoor activities build our large muscles and our indoor work doing paper cutting, coloring and drawings develops small muscles.

Some of the parents in our class have asked what they can do to complement our activities. We encourage you to continue what you are doing naturally – talking with and reading with your child, making sure your child is well rested and packing a healthy lunch. This is so important! Every day we benefit from your efforts by having happy, well-adjusted and curious children come to us.

We also love it when children arrive on time so that we can all begin our day together. It is equally important to have appropriate clothing for rainy days. A light rain is perfect for stimulating, enriching play and exploration! Don’t you agree?

 

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/

This week our Reggio approach focuses on the infinite possibilities of learning in nature.

In addition to the documented benefits of healthy living, enhanced mood and cooperation, increased agility, physical strength and large motor skills; learning in nature provides stimulation of all the senses and multiple opportunities to see relationships in our world. It might help to see learning in nature as it is broken down into the traditional learning categories.

Language and literacy relates to the hundred languages of children (from our first letter), and how children learn and express themselves through all the senses. They hear, see, smell and feel sounds, rhythms and patterns in nature. They transform their investigations through stories, projects, drawing, movement and dance.

In math, the natural world provides rich opportunities for important cognitive development – naming, counting, sorting, counting and classifying. Again, children experience patterns and sequences and they investigate and compare sizes, shapes and colors.

Science offers opportunities for complex thinking such as predictions, hypothesizing and synthesis. What happens when I add water to sand? How can I construct a house of sticks? How many of us holding hands will it take to reach around that large tree trunk?

Social studies in nature leads us to investigations about communities, relationships and life cycles.

When we posted our blog at noon last Friday we were about to have lunch and, after rest, walk to the pond. Wonderful opportunities opened up for us! At our all-school picnic, the 6^th graders served us and ate with us. At the pond we encountered 9^th graders who interacted with us, playing, talking and fully engaging in nature play for a multidimensional learning experience. Your children learned about cooperation, community building, empathy and relationships in what became a spontaneous activity. Authentic learning is guided by the structure and support of teachers who are able to give it the time and flexibility it needs to unfold naturally.

We started this week with a rereading of our story about bees. This was a follow-up to our school assembly on the first day when we had a beekeeper come and talk to us! Our focus was on the roles of bees in a community. This led to our discussion of our job chart and the chores we will do as we participate in the roles and responsibilities of our classroom community. One of these chores will be attendance. Photos of individual children will help them help us take attendance. They can “read” the photos and mark who is here. We began to learn about this process this week.

Did you know that Tuesday was International Teddy Bear Day? It was fun to incorporate teddy bears into our morning greeting!

In addition to greetings, we discuss the weather and our activities and chores for the day. Every day there is one special subject – PE, music or library. Next week we will ease into our French with morning greetings. Because this will be an in-class special, we will have the luxury of incorporating French within the flow of the day. Rather than a concentrated 30 minutes twice a week, for example, we may want to have more frequent 10-minute lessons.

Speaking of mornings, we know your children are young, and that they should not feel rushed. We hope you can work with us to find a balance between getting up and out in the morning, and giving them the important opportunity to start the day with their classmates in morning circle. We are all served well when we can start the day together. Democratic living in a community is one of our goals and we want your children to be full participants as much as possible as the day unfolds.

We began this week with individual choices, and your children chose to work at an easel, to draw under the table, and to play with blocks, to name a few.

Most exciting of all was our nature walk on Monday. We had a purpose, which was to each find a stick with a “Y” shape to make a nature catcher. We were busy little bees as we searched for (and found!) our sticks. Such intense looking. Some children were silent and concentrated. Others chattered nonstop. All found what was a comfortable way for them to fully engage in this activity. And then, a snake slithered across our path!

Throughout the week we have continued our nature investigations and have been busy gathering objects in nature for our nature catchers.

We have also begun self-portraits to build our powers of observation and awareness of ourselves. These and other of the children’s creations will be displayed in the classroom.

We are keeping our displays child-centered, meaning it is the children’s work that will be featured, as opposed to commercial or teacher-made displays. We also believe that it is the process that is developmentally important for children rather than the end product, per se. As we get more into our routines, you will begin to see documentation of how your children envision, plan and create their work.

Next week we will continue building on routines and adding new choices. As much as possible we will continue to be outside. We will begin to listen for sounds in nature, and we may transform what we hear through drawing and painting. Bringing the outdoors inside activities will include sorting our stones by size and shapes and possibly creating patterns and compositions with them.

Ms Kane and Ms S.

What a wonderful and exciting first week of school this has been! We have loved meeting your children! They are sweet, eager and curious, and are already developing friendships with one another and with us.

Our week has been low-key as we get to know one another and our routines. In addition to morning meeting (circle time) we have talked about what goes on in a day, and what our chores will be. We have already invited the children to be thinking about activities they would like to do.

Your children have been introduced to their Specials teachers. In library they sang a song and read a story. In music the children sang songs and played some games. During PE we went on a hike through the trails of the campus. Older students had made troll houses and, as we walked, we looked for these and when we found the houses, the children placed trolls in them.

A Reggio concept that we fully embrace is the importance of relationships – with ourselves, one another and with our environment. We will learn about ourselves this year – our feelings, likes and desires, and our physical selves. The water table has been a good way to explore properties of water and to learn about our senses in relation to the changing possibilities of the water. One way we build on relationships with one another is during snack and lunchtime. We all sit together. We stay at the table. No one is rushed. We eat and talk. We will learn that this is a special time to nourish our bodies and our souls.

We have begun establishing a relationship with the environment, as well. Thank you for sending in plants with your child. These play an important role in giving children some ownership of their classroom. In addition, they provide a healthy, aesthetically pleasing, and rich environment that will be conducive to many levels of investigation. They will also be springboards for developing responsibility and compassion as the children care for them.

We are all fortunate to have the beautiful campus at BCD as an outdoor classroom. We will end our week with a trip to the pond on Friday afternoon (we are writing this Thursday night!) We will see where our curiosity takes us – playing in the sand, in the water, collecting pebbles and/or building something! Be sure to ask your child what s/he did!

Lastly, we ask that your child bring in some more stones on Monday. These can be 1 – 5 inches. We would like each child to bring in 10 stones.

Enjoy your weekend. We look forward to seeing your children on Monday!

Ms. Kane and Ms. S