Some weeks, as I look through my notes, I find that if there's a 'theme' to be found, it's just plain learning and discovery. This took many forms over the Tuesday and Wednesday, and I'm sure there was fun to be had at home on Thursday, in the snow.
As I mentioned in last weeks post, I've started offering picture spelling cards to use with Scrabble tiles. An illustration appears at the top of the card, and the letters of the word below. The child selects a card, finds the letters in a 'pool' of them on the table, and then places them onto the card, spelling out the word. (I work with them to verbally support this by spelling out the letters one by one and then saying the word.) The children helped me to choose the first words for our cards: Mom, Dad, Love, Zoo, Cat and Dog. The first three will be words which they'll use as they begin note/message writing when they are 4 and 5 years old, as they begin to show interest in writing letters themselves. (There's a pretty broad age spectrum for this, by the way.)
I also offered some new puzzles of various levels of difficulty, and the children were clearly interested in trying each of them out. One was a 25 piece Picture in Frame ocean puzzle; a 12 piece animal puzzle with no picture, and a farm puzzle with pegs to use for holding, the picture of the inside of the farm is in the frame. The farm appeared to be a little more difficult for some children, the ocean puzzle required a lot of pattern-matching as well as trial-and-error, and the animal puzzle appeared to be the most easy to assemble.
At our Wednesday Gathering, I asked the children to help me make a park for the Teddy Bear counters to 'play' in. B wanted 'three bears' for the bears to play with; V suggested a football field and T, a soccer field. I added a fountain and a bench, and we began moving the Bears to and from different park sites, with plenty of counting. There's been a lot of progress in sight counting, pointing and counting from a distance; larger amounts of bears still need a 'touch and count' technique from time to time. I am seeing a lot of accuracy in this area with the children; we are working up to the number 6 right now, and so I'll be adding bears up to 10 next week.
We also did some sorting work. I'd offered a very large bowl of nuts for the children to do with as they wished, and a bit of ramp play ensued. "This is like skateboarding" said T, as he launched several Brazil nuts down. Then B had fun jumping over the little clusters of nuts on the floor before rolling some down. When that seemed to be tapering off, I brought out four dishes and had V and B each sit with a big pile of nuts, the dishes in a line between them, and placed one nut in each dish to signal where each type of nut should go. The girls had fun sorting the nuts into the dishes by type, and shaking them. "I hear the nut inside!" B exclaimed happily.
Wednesday, we read a lovely book about Henri Matisse entitled: "A Bird or Two", which spoke mostly about his love for color. Then, each child was given a cup and paintbrush and we mixed some custom colors for our easel work that day. V wanted to make purple, so she asked to start with red and blue, then added white to lighten it and some red to make it more of a pinky-purple color. T wanted green and yellow--"Ducks colors" he told us, and then added a lot of white to lighten it. B kept it simple, just green and black thanks, which made a beautiful hue of deep emerald. I mixed up some turquoise, and then we moved the paint to the easel. What I did notice was that our colors dried much darker than they were originally, and so next week, we'll revisit this (I've saved their paint) and make comparisons, and there will be time to adjust the paints as need be. I, for one, am curious to see what they will want to do!
Tuesday's art time started with 'magic pictures', a bunch of white hearts drawn in white crayon on watercolor paper to show how wax resist works. The children were excited to see hearts emerging from the red watercolor paint they spread on so thickly. V noticed that "the paint keeps moving" when she painted over the wax. After their first ready-made picture, they all clamored to 'do another', and so I showed them how they must rub the crayon hard over the paper, and then they painted again, delighted to watch the paint moving off some of the most waxed areas of their work.
A few other moments from our week:
V invites B over: "Hey, B, want to play dominoes? Want to play mailbox?" Sounds all good, but then we can't agree how to use the mailbox--door open, or shut? While I held onto the mailbox, the girls made a plan, to use it with the door open for three minutes on the timer, and then closed for the same amount of time. Their play resumed without any further hitch. Your children are really figuring out some of their own ideas for what feels good and fair for them.
What did your children remember about their time at home with you last weekend as we sang our song?
V: I played a Kirby video game.
B: I watch Sesame Street.
T: I made a skate park upstairs.
Children running running, and then hopping, around the Children's House outside. We have measured our growing bulbs again outside, which have doubled in height. And we're now seeing the little crocuses emerging from our planters and a big lump of green hyacinth is beginning to claim its space smack dab in the middle. It's always fun to have such a variety of plants to observe. More gems were found in the sandbox too, and V cracked us all up when she sat on the grapevine-trimmings "nest" the children have made. "I'm a bird on my nest!" she crowed at us.
T is painting at the easel in the kitchen. I overhear him: "Wiggle, wiggle. Hop, hop" he says as he paints. Later I asked him about this. He tells me "If I was dancing with a kangaroo".
We clipped some forsythia to take home to force blooms from. If you can, be sure to keep it in an easy-to-notice spot. I explained to the children that, by bringing the boughs in, we were tricking the plant into thinking the weather was warmer and that it was time to bloom. Then we made some predictions as to how many days it will take before the flowers open. V suggested 4 days; B guessed it would take two days; and T, loving big numbers, guessed that it would be 60 days. We'll just have to see!
And we'll see you next week! Please remember that we are only open Tuesday, and closed Wednesday and Thursday for conferences.
