To summer or not to summer?

I am experiencing something new this year: Fall Break. Not just an extra two days for Thanksgiving -- a whole week at the end of October. Many of my co-workers are off in Italy, Greece, and the south of France, but we have opted to stay in Belgium, catching up on sleep and cooking a lot and sewing and reading.

I've been thinking about teachers getting the breaks so many teachers say that they desperately need. I have yet to take the summer off -- this upcoming summer will be my first -- and that is a nice luxury to have. And we do work very hard. I enjoy the work immensely, so much that I miss it already and it's only Tuesday. I'm thinking about my students, though, and the transition back into school after that two month break. As much as the two month summer rest is nice, or the opportunities for extended travel, I think there is something appealing about year-round school. Getting children back on track and into the routine at the beginning of the year is quite the transition, especially with young children. I feel that my students are ready to move on from the initial start of the year now, because we have taken two months establishing our community.

This is more of a rambling than a fight for one side or the other. What do you think of year round school versus a traditional school year? And homeschoolers, do you find that you do your work year-round?

This seems interesting...

Keri Smith's How To Be An Explorer of the World

"Observe, Collect, Document, Analyze, Compare, Notice Patterns". That is what got me...it's a fun site to click through, and I'm going to keep my eyes peeled for the book so I can browse through that.

by Keri Smith, via sun moon stars rain .

Threaded Leaves

I mentioned these before; I saw them over here a little while ago and I knew that they just had to be in the classroom. The children gathered the leaves and then we used a needle and thread to connect the ones we selected to hang.

Pardon the florescent lights -- I'm not sure who decided that classrooms should be lit with them, but we might make the switch to some lamps to make our environment more appealing.

Into the Woods

On a perfect Thursday.

Puzzles

Excellent puzzles found at Kid O.

Creating Art, Conserving Materials.

How do we encourage children to create with care? How do we teach children about the value of art materials while getting them to continulously create, make, and try? This is something I have been struggling with since beginning to teach.

Everything can be used to make something new, I think, and with that theory in mind I am always accepting balls of yarn, toilet paper tubes, ceramic flower pots, basically anything. We can use things like this from time, and the random donated/found item can become something great in the eyes of a child.

But we have an easel in the classroom that is always being used, and from twenty children come about thirty paintings daily. That is a lot of paper, and a lot of paint that oftentimes becomes four pots of one color as children fail to wash a brush, or just really enjoy combining colors on the paper when there are four brushes. I don't blame them. But when someone is painting and they are looking at something besides their painting...then we're not valuing the materials, or what we're creating. If that ends up in the recycling at school or later at home, it will go unnoticed.

With a little inspiration from Camp Creek Blog, I've been thinking about teaching the value of the materials and what we create with them. Lori suggests teaching children about sketching, thinking, and planning, before making the final product.

With that in mind, we went into the Sonian Forest last week with our journals in hand. We sketched there, and returned to school, where we opened our journals to the page where we sketched, and copied that pictures onto a larger paper with black felt tip pens.


After our many many scheduled activities for the day around school, including lunch and rest time, we sat down at our pen drawings with watercolors and made our final product.


They are absolutely beautiful, and the children can talk about the process of making them. They can tell their families about what they painted and where they saw it, and I think that makes the artwork all the more special for them and the people they get to share it with.



I mentioned a potential project on clothes about a week ago, and I have to say, the interest in the forest that surrounds us every day may be stronger, and more widespread among the students. The other Pre-K teacher is having the same dilemma, but between studying games and communication.

I have to say, though, that it is nice to be choosing between two instead of the many times I have not been able to encourage in depth studies. Maybe you'll see a little of both.

How is my child doing?

Parent teacher conferences are approaching, and I have been sitting down to think about my students and how well I know them. I'm looking back through my observations, noting who they have been interacting with and in what ways; remembering instances they connected a letter to the sound it makes, and trying to think whether or not they display one-to-one correspondence. These are the three things so many parents are going to want to know about: Social-Emotional development, literacy, and mathematics.

What I want to tell them is that their children are amazing people who surprise me every day. They make the most beautiful artwork I've ever seen. They think of subjects that we talk about together from a completely original, fresh point of view. I laugh every single day, and so do they. Sometimes they forget to take their coat off before sitting down at a center to start work because they are so excited to start their day. The children and I all get a kick out of counting how many people have bananas in their lunches...every single day.

We are learning to recognize our letters, their sounds, and alliteration and rhyming. We are always counting and noticing patterns. We are working on being kind and respectful and safe and fair together. And this is all happening through our daily conversations, explorations, and interactions with people, places, and things. It is just amazing to be with these children five days a week -- I would not change it for anything right now.

I hope you are all settling into the school year, too.

Side note: These are in the cards for this week. Come back for the finished product!

Good design isn't just for adults. I'd love to have these guys in dramatic play, and perhaps they might drift into the book area to be read a book or two. I'm loving Donna Wilson's designs! I'm also picturing the children helping in the design of some furry classroom friends.

via ReForm School, designed by Donna Wilson

Wellies and clothes

More fantastic wellie action for your viewing pleasure...

The weather has been on the bad side this week, but we are still going outdoors to explore. We are really settling into the classroom and are becoming more comfortable with the community and the routines, and I think soon, we'll be ready to embark on a project.

After a few weeks of observations, I think a project on clothes could be really interesting for the children, and it could go in so many directions. The students are always talking about what they are wearing, what they have at home, and dressing in scarves in dramatic play to emulate other outfits, such as dresses, skirts, capes, and napkins. The school also requires them to have four different kinds of shoes at school, and that leads into its own study by itself.

We have our fall break in just three weeks, and when we return, I hope to have gathered enough initial data to launch into a project in November, as we begin to layer up.

It was interesting to read the Judy Harris Helm article I mentioned here and relate it to my new teaching post. I feel like I'm spending time getting to know they children's interests, as well as the who's and the why's of different children's interests. I think that helps immensely -- what is a fleeting whim, and what is a dissectable interest? What matters to these children's everyday lives that I can support them in learning more about?

I'm very excited about this.