Celebrating Fall & Family
This week we began our new theme for the month, "Family & Community," which we'll explore through an engaging variety of song, stories, art projects, math and language, social studies, and even science. We're also celebrating the beginning of autumn, which may be mild in our area but we still enjoy crisp breezes, blue sky, and a little bit of warm autumn color.
Our Circle Time this week included a song, "Riding Along the Open Road," which the kids learned to sing and then improvised with the lyrics through a movement game. They devised all sorts of ways to enjoy a Fall day, by skipping, marching, galloping, hopping, wiggling, and slithering "along the open road/under a sky that's clear/all in the Fall of the year."
We read together "Grandfather Tang's Story: A Tale Told with Tangrams" by Ann Tompert. Each child had their own set of tangrams to arrange in different animal shapes during this interactive and suspenseful story. This task may sound simple, but it's actually quite challenging. The kids worked cooperatively, guiding each other when one would get stuck. I shared with the kids that this fun puzzle actually gave them practice in important mathematical skills and stretched their visual-spatial capabilities.
Friday's Circle Time included "Show and Tell" (inspired by Ramona the Pest), where the children shared items from home that told something about their family.
For one of the exploratory sessions, the kids traced and cut their own set of tangrams out of construction paper to take home and create their own tangram stories and shapes, and to challenge their parents too. Did any of you try to make a rabbit or a fox out of the seven shapes? What about a hawk or crocodile?
Another exploratory session included collecting leaves from trees in the yard. We examined the shapes together, noticed the variety of shapes and edge patterns but also the symmetry in shape and even in the veins of each leaf. The kids created a beautiful fall leaf banner by cutting their own symmetrical (and some asymmetrical) leaf shapes from fall-colored construction paper.
During our art lesson this week, Ms. Spramani guided the children to begin a family portrait, building on the attention to detail that the kids exercised when creating their self-portraits two weeks ago. This time they looked at the shape of an egg to visualize the head shape for each family member, and they thought about proportion and spatial relationships when deciding where to draw each family member's head on the page, and how to size them.
The children stretched their literary skills in our final collaborative project of the week, transforming their pre-writing on "My Favorite Things" into a poem modelled after the song. Look for the delightful result in our next post!
Our Circle Time this week included a song, "Riding Along the Open Road," which the kids learned to sing and then improvised with the lyrics through a movement game. They devised all sorts of ways to enjoy a Fall day, by skipping, marching, galloping, hopping, wiggling, and slithering "along the open road/under a sky that's clear/all in the Fall of the year."
We read together "Grandfather Tang's Story: A Tale Told with Tangrams" by Ann Tompert. Each child had their own set of tangrams to arrange in different animal shapes during this interactive and suspenseful story. This task may sound simple, but it's actually quite challenging. The kids worked cooperatively, guiding each other when one would get stuck. I shared with the kids that this fun puzzle actually gave them practice in important mathematical skills and stretched their visual-spatial capabilities.
Friday's Circle Time included "Show and Tell" (inspired by Ramona the Pest), where the children shared items from home that told something about their family.
For one of the exploratory sessions, the kids traced and cut their own set of tangrams out of construction paper to take home and create their own tangram stories and shapes, and to challenge their parents too. Did any of you try to make a rabbit or a fox out of the seven shapes? What about a hawk or crocodile?
Another exploratory session included collecting leaves from trees in the yard. We examined the shapes together, noticed the variety of shapes and edge patterns but also the symmetry in shape and even in the veins of each leaf. The kids created a beautiful fall leaf banner by cutting their own symmetrical (and some asymmetrical) leaf shapes from fall-colored construction paper.
During our art lesson this week, Ms. Spramani guided the children to begin a family portrait, building on the attention to detail that the kids exercised when creating their self-portraits two weeks ago. This time they looked at the shape of an egg to visualize the head shape for each family member, and they thought about proportion and spatial relationships when deciding where to draw each family member's head on the page, and how to size them.
The children stretched their literary skills in our final collaborative project of the week, transforming their pre-writing on "My Favorite Things" into a poem modelled after the song. Look for the delightful result in our next post!
posted by Enicia Fisher at 10:51 AM
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Just testing
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