Whole Child Development
Children love to explore! That is a widely accepted fact! So here’s a little project you can do quickly and inexpensively to create a fun exploration station where they can explore shape, size, and texture, and create designs to their little hearts’ content!
If you’d like to incorporate a few more senses into your painting projects, add some regular salt generously to your tempera paint and use as fingerpaint or with a brush. The resulting project will have a bit more texture and grit that becomes even more visible as it dries. Use side by side with “regular” paint for a great texture comparison. This will spark interest as well as encourage the use of new vocabulary words like bumpy, gritty, sandy, smooth, etc. (If you’re not fingerpainting, you might want to use your older brushes for this one, as the salt tends to get into the bristles a bit.)
My Crayons Talk by Patricia Hubbard is a perfect introduction into the interplay between color and language. The girl in the story explains how her colors talk as she draws. For example, “Yellow chirps, ‘Quick, Baby chick.'” The accompanying picture shows the girl sitting in a straw-colored meadow, surrounded by baby chicks, while wearing a sunny sun dress and funky sunglasses.
Mouse Paint
Sorry about the delay on Positive Guidance Posts! Hopefully the combination of a few topics here will make up for my paucity of posts!
I hope that whoever said children shouldn’t play with their food, is OK with children experimenting with their food. Many people would agree that food can be an art form. This snack makes that statement quite literal.
This is a great song for learning about colors and for building rhyme recognition, an important skill for pre-readers (read more about phonological awareness here). Use this song during large group, music and movement time, or just as a filler during a transition. The little ones love it! Eventually, they’ll be ready to be the ones giving the clues!
As I mentioned before, the purpose of teaching about the five senses in preschool is not for the children to be able to recite the five senses, but to build sensory awareness. Whenever I introduce the five senses, I like to start out with the book, My Five Senses by Aliki. It does a great job of simply introducing each of the senses, and then pointing out how we may use several of them at the same time, and that we use them to be aware of what’s around us. It’s very brief, very simple, and right to the point.
When discussing art with children, we often find ourselves simply saying, “Oh it’s a dog!” or “How pretty.” Here are a few tips on how to bring some art concepts into your comments and discussions. [Read more…]
Introducing the new unit theme! Dat-da-da-dah! “Exploring the Arts through Our Senses”!
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