F is for Fire
Today we talked more about fire safety. The kids were still excited about seeing the fire station last night and they were acting out fireman role play.
In small groups we played a color game. There were eight houses of different colors. I hid a pretend flame behind a house and the children would use the color words to guess which house was on fire.
We also played a math game . We counted fire trucks.
And…. we reinforced calling 911 in emergencies. We talked about what constitutes an emergency and practiced calling 911 on the pretend phones that we made.
In circle time we read two books about firemen. One was a real pictures book and we were able to recap our night at the fire station. Its always interesting to hear the kids interpretation of what they saw.
We practiced a new calm down technique we called ” The Fireman” in honor of fire safety week. You can see it on facebook.
We tore red and yellow crepe paper to decorate large F’s. Tearing paper builds fine motor skills to get us ready to write.
Each day we see more and more skills being practiced from our conscious discipline strategies. Children are beginning to talk things out instead of hit or push. The children that are being hit or pushed are using their words to say ” You can not do that to me. ” One thing we have worked a lot on this week is using the term ” match my voice. ” Some of our kids are just LOUD . Some of them have more ” whiney” voices. Some of them have very quiet timid voices. One of the indicators we look for in worksampling is ” follows normal rules of conversation.” Yelling or high pitched voices or whiney tones are not ” normal conversation.” Many things cause this. Sometimes it gets us our way. Sometimes it draws attention to us. As we hear our friends talk very loud or whine we are saying to them calmly ” match my voice.” Immediately , they match our voice. Hopefully, that will become the norm. I hope you can see in all the posting and talking about this our goal is not to ” catch anyone” or pick on anyone . It is genuinely to give them tools of communication that are going to help them be more successful in life. One thing conscious discipline teaches us is that we sometimes expect children to already know how to act ( or speak ) in situations. Before judging or taking consequences you teach them the skill. We teach ALL day . It is our job.
