Walking Trip To Jenkintown

December 3, 2012                                      

                        Building Walk In Jenkintown

Our study of Buildings and Houses is growing as we begin to look more intentionally at different aspects of buildings.  This morning at Morning Meeting, we re-visited our Language Experience Charts where we brainstormed types of buildings and materials used to build building.  We decided that going for a walk in Jenkintown would be a wonderful next step. We had read several books last week about houses and the children are more familiar with concepts related to houses and buildings. We made a list of aspects of buildings to look for on our walk in Jenkintown. The following is the list of ideas that the children generated: 

Things To Look For On Our Walk In Jenkintown

chimneys

doors

roofs

windows- how many

bricks

houses made of stone

The children were so excited to be going on our first class walk off campus. They felt so proud of being “grown –up” enough to go on such a ‘big kid’ walk! We stopped to look at different types of buildings on our walk.  We noticed the different materials that the structures were made of and having the first hand experience of touching and feeling the large stone walls and bricks of various buildings we passed was a wonderful way to make this study more concrete for our children We looked at the different types of roofs on the houses and buildings we passed and stopped at each one and asked the questions; does it have a roof, is there a door to enter the building and do we see windows.  

Walking in Jenkintown was especially interesting because we were able to stop and look at many of the businesses in our community.  We stopped to look in the windows of   a hair salon, firehouse, restaurant and shoe store.  We were lucky enough to meet a police officer on our walk that stopped to chat with us and help us cross the big road!  We even saw three police cars and they put their flashing lights on for us to see!  We discovered the gazebo in the center of Jenkintown and then walked over to the bagel shop to have a little snack.  Several people shopping in town stopped to say hello to us and commented on how nice it was to see our children in our community.  We had such a wonderful morning and decided to take walks throughout the week to continue to explore building and houses.