February 6, 2013
We visited the library this morning and had the opportunity to look around the library and listen to a story about one of our favorite characters; Tacky. We read one of the books from the Tacky series and the children enjoyed the story so much that they requested that we bring a few more books from this series back to our classroom. Before going to the library we decided that we would look on the library shelves to see if we could find a few more of the books in the math series we started yesterday- The Greedy Triangle. Unfortunately we were not able to find the other math books but will continue to look elsewhere.
The children have developed really amazing listening skills. The love hearing books read aloud and their skill in larger group listening skills has grown tremendously throughout the year. We are not engaging in thoughtful conversations as we are reading aloud and the children are becoming more attuned to answering inferential questions, factual question and are even beginning to make story predictions from factual information they are processing from the stories. These are very important reading readiness skills that develop as the children are exposed to read aloud experiences.
What an incredible change in the children's drawings of themselves! Each month the children are asked to complete a self portrait drawing of themselves using colored pencil and multicultural crayons. We offer mirrors at the drawing tables for the children to use as they wish and encourage the children to 'take their time' in completing their work. The level of detail and attention that the children are now giving to this experience is so much more developed than at the beginning of the year. We have collected the portraits each month and will send them home at the end of the year.
Author's Sharing
After playing outdoors on this chilly Wednesday morning in the Lower School playground, the children were very relaxed and settled and this seemed like a perfect time to introduce" Shared Author Time.."
We have noticed an increased interest in writing amongst all of the children over the past few weeks. Journal writing/dictation has become much more elaborate. The stories are more imaginative and the sense of telling 'a story' is often more apparent as the dictations have a beginning, an end and sometimes even a middle! Children are identifying characters in their stories and some children are including the names of their classmates as the main characters! Yesterday, several children were involved in book making at the Writing Center. The children love listening to their stories read aloud to the group and seem to feel like this read aloud truly makes their story authentic. Today we randomly selected a few journals to share with the group. It was absolutely fascinating to observe the children listening to each others' journal stories. They spontaneously asked thoughtful questions and were fully engaged in this very personal language experience. Needless to say, the author that had the opportunity to share their work felt much pride.
During Choice Time today a small group played a number lotto game together. Through this activity the children practiced several important math readiness skills such as number recognition, 1:1 correspondence, visual discrimination and matching skills. The group was able to navigate the rules for the game handled simple tasks such taking turns with ease.
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