Monday News

February 11, 2013

After greeting each other at Morning Meeting today, we had an unexpected visit from Cinda's 1st grade class. The 1st graders were visiting to inform us about the grand opening of the 1st Grade Post Office! The children described their project to our children and invited us to participate in the fun of sending letters to friends at AFS.  Our children were so receptive and thoughtful as our guests went to great lengths explaining their project.  This conversation led to some discussion about buying stamps and sending letters. 

This seemed like a perfect segway to talk a little about Valentines Day with the children.  We discussed what we thought the feelings were that were associated with  love and then read the book I Love You, Mommy by Jillian Harker. The children connected immediately with the story and were eager to continue talking about what they love was. We recorded their responses in an Language Experience Chart which further supports our goals of Language and Literacy in our program.

The children are excited about the upcoming Valentines Day celebration.  We talked this morning about some of the special things that we thought would take place on the 14th and the whole notion of bringing Valentines Day cards for friends is quite appealing to all of the children! In anticipation of the day, we decided to use our Writing and Art studio as a place for children to work on projects they are interested in that may be connected to Valentines Day.  Several children wanted to decorate bags with paint, collage materials and stickers to use to hold the the cards they collect on the 14th.  This open-ended invitation provided an opportunity for children to express their creativity, practice fine motor skills and socialize with friends while creating art.

 Several of the children are interested in writing messages and making their own Valentines Day cards.  At the Writing Center, we added words to our word basket for children to copy that they may want to use in their cards. This is a wonderful way for children to practice handwriting skills and introduce sight vocabulary words. We added the words: love, my, be , friend, I , you thus far and will continue to add words as they children request them.

We introduced a game today where children were encouraged to expand and practice skills relating to positional terms. Above-below, around-through, up-down, behind-in front, besides-between were a few of the positional terms that the children were introduced to. The board game is compiled of pictures where a basketball is clearly placed in a particular position and there is a matching picture on a board , similar to lotto. We played the game once using the board and then used pairs of the matching card to play a game similar to Concentration.  This was an excellent tool to help develop memory and practice visual discrimination skills.