A Look Around Our Room

It is Friday and we are all doing the Friday dance. I am SUPER excited today that my daughter , Danielle will be flying in tomorrow morning to LIVE in Siloam Springs . She has lived in Hawaii pretty much for 5 years.

I caught McKayla in the loft today listening to music.  She had an extra CD in her hand and was moving it around and watching it catch light and make prisms on the ceiling.  It is so cool to watch kids learn when they are not expecting it or is wasn’t planned.

During small groups today the kids played a number game with clothes pins.  They counted the number of objects on the card and pinned a clothes pin on the right number.

We had costumes all over the room today.

I wish you all could be in our room at some time to see the busy fun learning that takes place.  You have to be in the middle of it to experience it .    I didn’t intend to but took a long video of random play in our room.  It started with a fun conversation that took place at the table.   It is ten minutes long , but very indicative of what happens in our room.  Notice the circle I make.  I come back and ten minutes later several of the kids are exactly where they were engaged in whatever they had chosen to play with.

The next video is part of our small group time.  Usually four children go to the table at a time.  Most days a story is read.

From Kidshealth.org

Preschoolers know a lot of things they didn’t know as babies. They don’t read independently, but if they’ve been read to a lot, they know a thing or two about reading:

• They know books are read from front to back.
• Pictures should be right-side up.
• Reading is done from left to right.
• The language of books is different from spoken language.
• Words have different sounds in them.
• There are familiar and unfamiliar words.

All of these are emergent literacy skills — important building blocks toward the day when they’ll read independently. How can you encourage further development of these skills? Just keep reading aloud.

Choosing lots of different books to read aloud will build your preschooler’s vocabulary, and help your child learn about different topics and understand how stories are structured and what characters do in them. Your child also will learn that:

• Text is words written down.
• Letters in a specific order form a word.
• There are spaces between words.

Understanding these basic concepts will help when kids start formal reading instruction in school.