Self Expression

Journal Writing

As journal writing has easily become a part of our morning routine, the teachers have noticed how the Cardinals are becoming immersed in their work. They display great concentration and patience while drawing and creating images of stories that are in their minds. The children enjoy visiting the journal table and take their time dictating their thoughts to a teacher as she writes their own words down. Today, Lilly even allowed Paula the opportunity to share her journal story with the group at Morning Meeting! This led to a discussion of the people and animals in the story and we learned that they are called characters. We counted and identified the four characters in Lilly's story that were all part of a bug family.

We noticed during journal writing how influenced the children are from each other.  The children are stopping and paying attention to the stories that their classmates are dictating and it is amazing to observe how this process inspires the children in their own work.  Today's journal entries were much more elaborate and descriptive .  The joy that the children glean when listening to their words read back to them is such an important aspect of this process.

Self-Portraits 

The intent and focus of the children was clearly evident as we began a new activity in the classroom. We started putting together our self portraits by drawing with colored pencils and multicultural crayons. At this center, we started by looking into a mirror at all the features of our faces. Individually, each child identified the parts that they saw and explained which color they thought would be best to use for the different aspects of the face. It was wonderful to hear the children's words as their emerging ideas about geometry came through. They stated, "My face is a circle", or "I think my mouth is a line". The children also shared their beginning ideas about diversity as they mentioned the colors of their skin, or different colors of eyes and hair among themselves and that of their friends. 

We finished our morning with a walk around campus.   The Cardinals' interest in nature is growing and growing!  They loved exploring our beautiful campus and were fascinated  and curious with each new area.  We collected lots and lots of things from nature on our adventure today and the children had lots of questions about the items we found.  We will add these questions to our I Was Wondering board and it will be both interesting and exciting to see where these interests may lead us.  The days are flying by so quickly and we are so happy to observe friendships developing and a clear sense of community evolving. 

Peace In Our Day...

Paula was interested in sharing  the customs and traditions that her family experiences each year as they celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.  Preparing a beautiful meal for family and friends is always a favorite part of the holiday! Paula wanted to show the children some of the items that grace her dinner table each year during the holiday season.











She placed a large table cloth on our Meeting area rug and created together we created our own beautiful holiday table!







  Using special flower napkins, candles, flowers and gourds we transformed our classroom into a festive gathering spot.  Paula talked about  how special it was to share the New Year with her family each year, and how special it was to now share it with her new Cardinal family.

Paula lit the Sabbath candles and sang the special prayer that her mom would sing when lighting the candles to begin the holiday.  We listened as she shared the experiences she had with her own family and her boys when they were children growing up.  We looked at kiddish cups that belonged to her sons and we ate raisin challah and dipped apples in honey.  We learned that dipping the apples in honey symbolizes the wish for everyone to have a sweet and happy New Year.  We read Sound The Shofar! A Story for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur by, Leslie Kimmelman which was a perfect book to read aloud for children of this age.  

Our I Was Wondering... question bulletin board is filling up with many, many thoughts. We were inspired to create a Question Board for many reasons.  Initially, we felt that this process was a way to acknowledge the children's thoughts. We believe that creating an environment which is rich in language and words supports and respects each child's ideas and is a meaningful way to begin to build a sense of community within our classroom.  This is the beginning of children learning to ask questions and engage in research.  The very first questions that were posted this year were about the sounds that cardinals make.  Today we revisited these questions and talked about ways that we may learn more about what we were curious of.  The teachers suggested using the Internet to see if we could Google bird sounds and fine the cardinal sounds. We engaged in an amazing listening activity where we listened to not only the sounds of Cardinals, but also of the bird sounds of all of our other Early Childhood friends!  We listened to Catbirds, Owls and Doves!  For a first day of bird listening, the children did great!  We will pursue this activity and see if the children  can discriminate different bird  sounds  and we will play some interesting listening games.  Below is the website we used to listen to Cardinal sounds. 

 Enjoy listening with your child and let us know how it goes!

http://www.birdjam.com/birdsong.php?id=3