Smorgasbord of Learning
Today we have hopped all over the place learning. Ideally, that is what will happen as we look for ways to teach children where they are.
Remember we do continual online assessments but observations that we make . Sometimes that is just text as we record a conversation or explain in detail something that took place . Many times we take pictures. It is easier to take a picture. We can look at the picture later when we have more time to dictate the observation . Here’s an example :
We were playing a game of body parts BINGO. Grayson said ” I need more hexagons. ” Well.. yes you do. 🙂 I snapped a picture. Now, that I have time during nap time I can go back and pull that picture into my online worksampling ap and tell ” the rest of the story. ” It would fall under math indicators of development like : 1. Begins to recognize and describe the attributes of shapes. 2. Orders , compares and describes objects according to one attribute. 3. Shows beginnings awareness of numbers and quantity. Those are just the MATH indicators I could make an observation on . Three times a year we make reports and this type of data will help us make decisions about what we need to spend time exploring. Obviously for Grayson… we don’t need to work on shapes. 🙂
I said all this to say – When we have the ap open taking observations the pictures are not saved on our camera roll so you are seeing less pictures than normal Don’t be sad. It just means that we are working hard.
This morning in family time we did a germs experiment. I started family time with glitter on my hands . As we gave high fives and shake hands and hugged my glitter was spread all around the circle. Just like germs do if we don’t wash our hands well.
It may be hard to see but in their hands are signs of fall they found for me. A brown leaf , a branch ( stick ) with no leaves because they all fell off ( LOL !) and fallen pinecones.
It may be hard to look at something like this picture and think “Awesome , she is gaining skills to be a great writer! ” That is exactly what she is doing. Remember a while back I told you that our motor skills strengthen from the inside out. We must have a strong core and arms and legs that we can control before those fingers are ready to correctly grasp a pencil. Khloe was so excited and spent a lot of time here building ramps she could walk on . Some of the surfaces were a little shaky. She even fell a few times but she got back up and tried again . Many of her friends joined her. THIS was a wonderful activity that has many positive outcomes that was initiated by a child.
For the first time ever we used the new monitor to do a movement song. I don’t want it to become a routine but for today it was fun. We did head , shoulders, knees and toes .
Oh and some of you know the struggle we have getting doctors to actually do hearing screenings on our children during their well child check. When we are audited ” the doctor didn’t do it ” is not an acceptable excuse. We have looked at other avenues for having it done each year. This year I bought a used screener off EBAY. I had Matt , our speech therapist , train me on how to use the machine . Hearing checks are complete. 🙂 There is more than one way to skin a cat.
Oh yeah.. we had a fire drill too.