10 Secrets to Raising Good Listeners {Janet Lansbury}
Weekend Reads 4.2.11
by notjustcute Filed Under: Get Outside, Learning through Play and Experience, Positive Guidance and Social Skills, Uncategorized, Weekend Reads 4 Comments
Whole Child Development
by notjustcute Filed Under: Get Outside, Learning through Play and Experience, Positive Guidance and Social Skills, Uncategorized, Weekend Reads 4 Comments
by notjustcute Filed Under: Learning through Play and Experience, Uncategorized 4 Comments
Here’s a quick one I’m quite sure you can take and improve on! For your flower theme, create an interactive bulletin board or flannel board activity by creating flower centers with the written numeral and corresponding number of dots. Then provide flower petals for the children to count out and place around the center, matching the dots in a one-to-one ratio. This activity supports preschool math skills like numeral recognition, counting, color recognition, and even patterning if they choose to use it that way!
by notjustcute Filed Under: Learning through Play and Experience 3 Comments
Here’s a quick sensory table idea for your unit on plants, seeds, flowers, or gardens. Fill your sensory bin with soil – either right out of the bag, or right out of the ground. Add some pansy pony packs, hand tools, magnifiers, a few small containers with water, gloves, and even worms if you’re feeling extra organic! Let the children plant the flowers in the bin, examining the roots as they go. If they want to pull the flowers apart, examining their parts, that’s OK too!
by notjustcute Filed Under: Building Readers, Learning through Play and Experience Leave a Comment
I just wanted to share some photos from the experiment we did after reading The Empty Pot (details on the experiment here). I used pea seeds since they’re nice and large…..and because I already had them on hand, seeing as how I’m way behind on actually getting them in the ground. Here’s the difference between the two samples after about a week’s time.
by notjustcute Filed Under: Building Readers, Create, Learning through Play and Experience 2 Comments
Planting a Rainbow is one of my many favorites by Lois Ehlert. Her illustrations are striking and her text is simplistic yet descriptive. Planting a Rainbow follows the story of a mother and child as they plant a rainbow of colors in their garden. It follows the process of planting bulbs, seeds, and seedlings, and tending them as they grow, and grow, and grow. Finally they can gather a rainbow bouquet, knowing they can grow another rainbow the following year!
by notjustcute Filed Under: Learning through Play and Experience 42 Comments
If you’re exploring seeds, plants, and flowers with your preschoolers this spring, it’s always great to get out and discover some applications within that theme on a field trip! Field trips don’t have to be elaborate. Most often, I would say that knowing that the host can connect with your children and offer them hands-on opportunities at their level is worth far more than an extravagant locale. Finding everyday, familiar places and then exploring them in-depth, allows the children to make more connections with their previous knowledge, and helps them to reconnect that knowledge again as they visit in the future. Here are some field trip ideas within the garden theme.
by notjustcute Filed Under: Unit Themes Leave a Comment
In spite of the fact that Winter keeps shoving her snowy foot in the door around here, it is actually spring- even if only according to the calendar. If I had to pick just one theme to study with children in the spring time, I think it would be seeds, plants, flowers, and gardens. (OK, that didn’t really sound like just one theme, but they’re all interconnected, so I’ll let it go.)
by notjustcute Filed Under: Learning through Play and Experience, Positive Guidance and Social Skills 60 Comments
Dramatic play is a fantastic way for preschoolers to really synthesize the information they’ve been gathering throughout their experience with a theme or unit. They naturally use new vocabulary words, implement concepts, and contemplate new ideas all in a meaningful way. Here are a few ideas for dramatic play themes within a seeds, plants, garden, or flowers unit.
by notjustcute Filed Under: Building Readers, Learning through Play and Experience 2 Comments
What unit would be complete without great books to incorporate?
Ok, first of all, a few that are old standards, not in any specific book. I always try to brainstorm nursery rhymes and fairy tales as I do my book list. These are all too often disregarded in favor of the newest and freshest. We need to remember however, that these are new to most young children and necessary for a foundation for future literacy. Think of it as the Shakespeare and Homer for preschoolers. Here are two that come to mind on the topic of seeds: Mary Mary Quite Contrary, of course; and Jack and the Beanstalk. Any others you would add?
by notjustcute Filed Under: Learning through Play and Experience Leave a Comment
It’s only June, and my preschool age son is already antsy for school. He asked me to “play preschool” with him yesterday. A convenient request, since I’m pretty good at playing preschool. He’s watched the show Sid the Science Kid on PBS (a great show for kids and teachers alike), and wanted to do a “Super Fab Lab” science activity like they do. He was in luck! I just happened to have such an activity on hand! It might be one you’d like to recreate as well!
I had been sprouting pumpkin seeds in Ziplocs with wet paper towels. It gives them a jump-start when you plant them, and also helps me determine whether or not the seeds we’ve dried from last year’s jack-o-lanterns are viable seeds. Well, the seeds were great, and I’d planted all I could use, but still had quite a few left over in a bag. Being a procrastinator, I left the last bag on the window sill, until I decided what to do with it. And then I forgot about it. I noticed it the other day, and it had full-on seedlings in it. Luckily I didn’t throw it out, because it was perfect for our “Super Fab Lab”.
In early education, there is too much distance between what we know and what we do. I bridge the gaps that exist between academia, decision-makers, educators, and parents so that together, we can improve the quality of early education while also respecting and protecting the childhood experience.
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