Caps for Sale
Today is a national holiday called hat day . I didn’t do the research to find out why they actually scheduled a day honoring hats but I figured why not. 😂 So today the children arrived with hats of many different kinds.
Teachers too.
Just this act alone gives us opportunity for so many conversations. Why do people wear hats? Are hats worn for looks or for function? What is function? Why do baseball players wear baseball caps?
It also reminded me of one of my favorite books. If you’ve never read ” Caps for Sale” you should. It’s basically a book that teaches the philosophy of monkey see monkey do. It’s about a peddler who sells caps. He lies down under a tree to rest. Monkeys come and take all of the hats that he has stacked on top of his head. They wear them. When he wakes up and find they have the hats he yells at them. They yell back. He shakes his fist at them. They shake their fist back. He stomps his feet at them. They stomp their feet back . Finally out of frustration he takes his hat off his head and throws it on the ground and guess what they do? They take all of his hats off their heads and throw them on the ground. He gathers them and goes about his business.
We played with our hats to see how many we could stack on top.
We also played a little game of monkey see monkey do. There’s a great little life lesson in there somewhere. I told the older kids that the little kids watch everything they do and many times mimic them because they think they are so cool. True story
We also are seeing a lot more big body play with our boys. Boys inherently wanna wrestle. We usually let it go on for a while until someone gets hurt or it just gets too much to manage. Ive blogged before about big body play and will revisit another time but it’s not a bad thing
We had lots of imaginative play going on today. This was the biggest horse I’ve ever seen. 
The children lined the chairs up and said it was a horse and it was taking them to the park. You might wonder what kind of teaching can go on during an activity like that. If you look closely there are children climbing underneath. Not only can we enrich language but we can talk about things like – behind – on top of – underneath. All kinds a preschool skills can be taught if a teacher just listens and observes and finds exactly the right time to scaffold the learning . Sometimes , most times , it’s more beneficial to just observe.
I posted this on our Instagram earlier but the kids really tackling one of the harder skills in our purple book – Hagerty. They are taking the onset/beginning sound of a word and substituting it with another letter. They are doing awesome
It was a really good day and again we are thankful for a spring like day in the middle of winter.     
