D is for Drawing... on the windows

Last week I walked into one of our classrooms to find something amazing all over the windows.

 



 

 In a previous post we talked a little bit about Animated Literacy and how we use a multi-sensory approach to expose the kids to letters and how to read, write, and pronounce them. One of our kiddos and his staff chose to explore the letter D using window markers. Window markers are great because they are a) super motivating, when else can you draw on the window? and b) super washable.

This little guy showed us what a smarty he is by imitating a drawings of a dinosaur and dog and then independently drawing a dog the next day (you can see his work in the black). He also practiced printing the letter "D," amazing!


 

The green dinosaur and blue dog were drawn by our staff. She used simple shapes to demonstrate how they can be used together to create a whole picture. You can also see that she printed the word "Dinosaur" clearly for our kiddo to copy, his version contains all the letters but is a little more abstract to the right of his dinosaur. Skills like printing in a line, correctly spacing letters, and printing in an appropriate size will all come along but for now we are celebrating the success of a smattering of letters, dinosaurs, and dogs all over the STA windows.



Friends!

 

Friends are such an important part of childhood and school. At STA, our kiddos make friends and play together just like other children, sometimes it just takes some practice to learn how to play and interact. We currently have a group of "big kids," our mostly 5 and 6 year olds, that love to play together. It's wonderful to watch them spontaneously create imaginary play scenarios between Spiderman and Ironman, or to run away and rescue each other from an adult that has turned into a scary monster. They are learning to take cues from other participants, communicate their ideas and desires, and use their imagination.
Not all of our kiddos are quite there yet. It takes a lot of language skills and an ability to cope with following another's agenda to engage in play of this kind. For the little ones that need to learn how to play and interact we like to use resources like turn taking games or crafts where resources need to be shared and requested. Some of our kids are encouraged to show a completed craft or a cool toy to a friend, this helps them to initiate a conversation or social interaction. During the days it is always important that our kids get lots of opportunities to play and work together. We absolutely love to see them make friendships and connections with each other.

 

Friendship Wreath

Today, during the circle portion of Kids Club we started practicing the singing the “Reindeer Pokey” for our performance at our Christmas party. The children did a great job participating by doing the actions. It was somewhat familiar because last week the children were practicing the original “Hokey Pokey”. Each child wore a set of reindeer antlers, which was very cute!!

We read a book about painting called "We Are Painting" as a fun transition into our fun painting craft. During the book I tried to engage each of the children by asking them questions or give them a direction (e.g., “What color?”, “What doing?”, or “Show me the..?”).

 

Then during craft the children put on paint shirts and got to get a little messy. They each choose a color and stamped each of their friend’s paper wreaths. They turned out great!!

Snowmen

One of my favourite things to do at STA is to go downstairs at the 3:15 when all of our peanuts have gone home and take a look at all of the art that has been created during the day.

Many school readiness skills can be practiced through art and craft projects. Skills like cutting and gluing require more than just scissors and glue. The kids need to understand concepts like spreading glue or how much glue to use, then they need to be able to sequence picking up the glued paper, turning it over, and pushing it onto the other piece. Cutting requires a lot of hand strength, hand-eye coordination, and motor skills to cut on a line. Rather than having our kids sit at tables and practice cutting boring shapes and lines we turn them into art and craft opportunities.

Lately, the trend seems to be snowmen. Perhaps our staff were inspired by the recent and upcoming weather in Calgary.

These snowmen have all involved cutting or drawing circles, gluing objects, and following instructions from an adult or teacher. The interesting thing about all of these snowmen is that each turns out totally different from the rest. It could be googley eyes, cotton balls, glitter, real branches, or hand drawn details but every snowman is different from the next.

In the end, each kid practices a skill that every teacher who has ever had to hand back work before can appreciate; they write their names somewhere on the sheet! Not all of the kiddos are quite ready for printing so they get some help from their staff but in the end all of the art work gets a name and the kids get to practice taking responsibility for and labeling their work.

Eyes, Ears, Mouth, and Nose

An important part of All About Me is learning about our bodies. A lot of our kids are still learning to identify their body parts so this has been a perfect opportunity to practice that skill. Most of our crafts have been focused on faces lately, this allows the kids to sort out where eyes go in relation to mouth, or that ears go on the side and a nose goes in the middle. In Kids Club we've been singing Head and Shoulders... and Elephants Have Wrinkles to help with identifying all parts of the body. For gym time we've been doing a lot of the Hokey Pokey to work more on identifying and also body awareness.

My name is ____ and I like...

• dinosaurs
• animals x2
• the water table
• cars x2
• crafts
• letters
• bubbles
• music x3
• chocolate
• to sleep
• Play-doh
• Wolverine
• tickles
• drawing
• my brother
• Angry birds x2
• Buzz Lightyear
• colouring
• elephants
• my friend
• to sing songs
• hats

Last week in Kids Club we made self-portraits! Below each we included a box where the kids could practice writing or identifying the letters in their name and then pick one thing that they like. For the kiddos who have stronger language skills we were able to ask them "What do you like?" or "What do you like to play with?" and for the kiddos who aren't quite there yet we had the staff identify one highly preferred thing. The kids got to reflect on their physical appearance by selecting hair and skin colour and then adding on eyes, nose, and a mouth. Most of our faces came out happy, a couple were undecided or sad, but all of them were beautiful!

 

This week we are making collage faces that show different emotions. We have prepped eyes, noses, and mouths for happy, sad, mad, and surprised faces. The kids get to build each face and practice making expressions themselves while they glue and piece together the pictures.

 



Pink and Purple Play-doh

 

We have started working on incorporating Animated Literacy into our days at STA. Every two weeks we will introduce a new letter and focus on activities that promote exposure to that letter.

 

Currently we are playing with the letter P. Today we used pink and purple Play-doh to talk about "P" and the sound it makes and words that start with it. We passed out Play-doh, picked a colour, and started to play. We used our fingers to poke and pinch it. Then pulled, pushed, pressed, and patted it and finally put it back in the pots.