I Am Unique
This week we are talking about all the things that make us unique or special . Children at this age dont see color of skin or hair or eyes as a characteristic as much as they notice colors of clothes or kinds of shoes. I was almost reluctant to do this the little skin tone matching game with them. I kind of like their blindness of color. 🙂
We did small groups today. This was the first time we have tried this since school started. The day , even though we had rain, went rather smooth. The children seemed to flow from one area to the next and get along with their friends. It appears they are settling in and not feeling the need to ramble and roam so much. In small groups we read a book called ” I Like Myself .” One of the most important things we do in preschool is help the children develop a strong self confidence. We also did a name/ picture puzzle. This puzzle is in your cubby for you to do again at home. We are spending a lot of time this week pointing out our names and the first letters in our name. Those are the letters that are the most important to us. We also took out arms and laid them on the table and compared. Some were lighter than others. Some arms were darker. We took flesh tone paint and I let the children chose which one they felt was closer to their skin color. Some were VERY close. If it wasnt right we added other colors to blend and eventually get what matched each childs skin color.
Rain , rain go away, come again another day….
Today was our first day inside all day. We expected it to be a little tough this early in the year. Thankfully it was a piece of cake ! Bright Beginnings is a three star quality program. One indicator of quality is that one hour of gross motor play is offered every day regardless of weather. This mean that when it is too bad to go outside the should have alternatives for inside gross motor play. To be even more specific it has to cover 9 different gross motor skills. We have two laundry baskets full of materials to use on rainy days We call them our rainy day toys.
Also mandated is a developmental assessment within 45 days of enrollment . We started that process today . Instead of doing each child at a time which would take about 40-60 minutes per child we break it up and make it like games. Today we did some fine motor and cognitive assessments. I loathe standardized testing for children. We take observations every day on each child so we ” know ” where they are. But… alas, it is connected to our funding. The people , legislators , that give us money need statistics to prove that our programs are working. This weeks assessments and to set a base line. We will do another assessment near the end of the school year. In a few weeks we will schedule parents conferences to talk about what we found.
In circle time today we read ” Silly Sally .” Silly Sally went to town walking turning upside down. We played name games and sang new songs. My favorite was Laurie Berkner’s ” Song in My Tummy.” We talked about what it means to be unique. We will explore this more this week by looking at the color of our eyes and our hair.