Our Building Study Is Taking Shape

It's all coming together...

Language and Literacy

The children were asked to reflect on our walking trip to Jenkintown yesterday where we looked at buildings and houses in our neighborhood. Children were asked to describe a part of the walk that they especially enjoyed and to think about something they noticed or learned about buildings.  We used the large experience chart paper to write our class story and the children had the opportunity to see their spoken words in print, which supports our curriculum in developing expressive language and readiness skills.  The children then had the opportunity to express their ideas through drawing.  The children used thin markers, colored pencils and crayons to draw a building that they saw on our walk.  We worked with each child individually and helped him/her recall some of the details of the building they wanted to draw. A few of the leading questions that we asked to helped the children focus on recalling details were: “Was the roof flat or pointed? Did you see a door to enter the building? What did it look like? Did you notice any windows?”. After they took their time and completed their drawing, the children described their illustrations. It was fascinating to observe the detail and maturity in the expressive language the children are beginning to use.

Spanish

Spanish with Alicia this morning included several exciting activities. We started off, as usual, taking turns greeting one another and practicing our Spanish greetings. Then, we reviewed our numbers with a fun cube activity in which we all got to roll the cube and then we counted to the number that was rolled. After counting, we practiced a song we will be singing and moving to for our Winter Concert.  We are having such fun learning Spanish and spending time with Alicia.

Exploring Dollhouses

We added two beautiful dollhouses to our classroom today for children to play with and explore. These materials help support our study of buildings and homes and offered the children opportunities to explore imaginative play in new ways.  Adding new classroom materials always sparks interest and keeps our classroom fresh.  The children especially enjoyed using the many different people as props to extend their play.  The children played cooperatively as small groups of children played with the houses together.

Further Exploration of Buildings

The weather was so magnificent that we decided to take advantage of the opportunity to take another walk into Jenkintown to look at buildings.  The children were very excited to return to a familiar spot and were so confident going on our 2^nd off campus walk!  We had limited time and decided before going that our destination was going to be to see the Jenkintown Post Office.  The children noticed brick walkways and were excited to identify familiar buildings, building materials and familiar parts of buildings such as chimneys, windows and porches.

Our study is exciting…. Please spend time noticing aspects of your homes. The children love engaging in conversations and learning new information.  Talking about materials that your homes have been built with as well as the different rooms in your home is a great beginning. During your everyday routines take the opportunity to help your child notice the details of homes and buildings that you pass. Feel free to take pictures, create drawings, write down questions or stories which we can share at Morning Meeting discussions. This is a great way to connect home and school and help our study gain momentum. 

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.