Our Week in Pictures

Here's a look at what we've been up to!

We....

 started polishing some rocks in our rock tumbler,

 practiced writing the word, "Rock,"

 painted rocks,

 listened to Lisa Ralls as she explained her rock and fossil collection,

 examined rocks and fossils with magnifying glasses,

 wrote questions for Lisa (each student had his/her own question), asked the questions, and wrote the answers,

and enjoyed our first field trip to Oakwood Park! (I didn't get any pictures of our actual rock activities during this field trip, which is a major bummer. We made a map of our route to the park and as we found rocks and added them to our bucket we marked the location on the map. When we arrived at the park, we talked about how those rocks got where they were. This helped us answer our question, "How do rocks get everywhere?")

I want to send out a huge thank you to Robin Charlson and Carrie Peterson for coming with us on our field trip yesterday! It helps so much to have a few extra adults while we are out of the classroom. 

We'll be continuing with our rock study next week. The kiddos seem to have learned so much with this study already, and I'm excited to see how much more they can learn. 

Have a fantastic weekend!

Diving Into Rocks!

Goodness! It has been way too long since I blogged. I'm sorry about that. I'm hoping to do better with this week.

As I mentioned in the newsletter last week, we started working on our first study: Rocks! I am so excited for this study. To many adults, I'm sure learning about rocks doesn't really sound all that exciting. In the eyes of a preschooler, though, it has so many opportunities. After exploring rocks for a few days, I had the students tell me what they would like to learn about rocks. Here are some of their questions:

1. Where do rocks come from?
2. How do they get everywhere?
3. How do rocks get smooth?
4. How do rocks get rough?
5. Can we color on rocks?

Starting tomorrow, we'll start investigating the answers to these questions. I have two big events planned to help us. First, I have a guest speaker, Lisa Ralls from Winnebago County Conservation, coming on Wednesday to show the kiddos her rock collection and introduce them to fossils. On Thursday, I'm hoping to take a walking field trip to Oakwood Park to see where we can find rocks. (See the bottom of this post if you would like to come with us!)

We'll also be experimenting with a rock tumbler to see if we can turn rough, dull rocks into smooth, shiny rocks.

For now, I'll leave you with a few pictures from last week. Enjoy!

If you are interested in coming along on our field trip to Oakwood Park on Thursday, please let me know. In order to go, I need at least two extra adults for the morning class and at least one extra adult for the afternoon class. Of course, we would welcome as many adults as we can get! Thank you!

Have You Filled a Bucket Today?

We are elbow-deep into being “bucket-fillers” this week! I’m going to focus this post on what exactly that means.

Here’s the theory (which originated in the book for adults How Full Is Your Bucket? by Tom Rath and has been translated into many, many children books - we read this one):  Everyone has an invisible bucket over their head. When your bucket is full, you feel great. When your bucket is empty, you feel bad. Feeling bad often causes us to treat each other badly. Our goal, with this theory in mind, is to fill each others buckets. When we fill someone else’s bucket, our bucket gets filled up too. We feel better by making other people feel better.

I always, always, always try to emphasize the positive, (If I’m asking the kids to be bucket-fillers, I better be a bucket-filler myself!) so we focus on being bucket-fillers here. On a wall in our south classroom, we have a line of buckets – each one has the name (and, soon, a picture) of a student. Every time I, or someone else, sees a friend filling someone’s bucket, I will say, “_________, you just filled her bucket!” This is the friend’s cue to go put a pom-pom in his/her bucket. 

As we start to fill up buckets, we will get a sticker on our big class bucket for each full individual bucket. When our class bucket is full, we will have a bucket-filler celebration!

My intent in using this theory with the kiddos is to help them learn friendship skills. They’ll be learning how to recognize feelings in themselves and those around them and to realize how their actions can affect those feelings. It provides them with the vocabulary they need to explain how they are feeling. After just two days of using this theory, I had a friend come to me today and say, “Mrs. Hansen! I just gave my friend a kitchen necklace. I filled his bucket!” He knew he made his friend feel good, and he felt good because of it. Now we have a way to talk about it.

As I mentioned in my last post, this is one of my all-time favorite techniques in preschool! I love it and the kids love it! Let me know if you’d like to know more about it or if you have any questions.

I’ll blog again on Friday to let you know what else we have been up to this week!

Manners, Manners, and More Manners (Plus Some Snapping!)

We survived our second week together! We had a truly fantastic time this week, too!

We’re still learning routines and procedures. These things take time, and I’m sure we’ll have plenty of practicing and reviewing ahead of us. The kids have been doing a great job so far though. We focused on circle time manners this week. We watched a super cute video called Can You Teach My Alligator Manners?. (You can find it here, if you are interested in watching it at home.) We stopped as we watched and talked about what the alligator was doing that wasn’t okay and how he could change.

After we finished the video, we played a fun game to practice our circle time manners. I asked a question and rolled a ball around the circle to give each child a turn to answer. The children knew it was their turn to answer the question when the ball was in their hands. While they waited, they practiced their circle time manners; they sat on their X’s, watched the person who was talking, and waited for their turn to talk. They had a blast with this game!

On Thursday, after practicing all week, we made a list of circle time manners. The kiddos came up with everything I had hoped they would think of. Our four big rules are: (1) Wait my turn to talk. (2) Sit on my bottom. (3) Raise my hand. (4) Sit still. We’ll read through these rules every day, and I am sure circle time will be a breeze very, very soon!

Another highlight from this week was our snap paintings on Thursday. I read about this art project on another preschool teacher’s blog and thought it sounded like a blast. I was right! Here’s what we did: 

I stretched rubber bands around a cookie sheet, slid a piece of paper under the rubber bands, covered the rubber bands in paint, and let the kids snap away. This was a great fine motor exercise. The biggest challenge for them was holding on to the pan with one hand and stretching the rubber band with the other hand. It took quite a bit of strength for them to do this. Of course, the fact that they were splattering  themselves (and me) with paint made it all worth it! I'm hoping to get these paintings hung up on our art wall this weekend. Please come take a look at them!

We’ve also started to jump into some more academic areas. We’ve matched letters, sorted shapes, and practiced writing our names. 

Next week, we’ll be focusing on friendship manners. I’m going to introduce my absolute favorite friendship technique – buckets! I’ll share more about this next week. I cannot wait to share this with your children!

The End of a Great First Week

We made it through our first week! I am already falling in love with this new group of students. They make me smile, laugh, and think.

Like the first two days of school, we spent the next two practicing routines and trying to remember our classroom rules. Miss Lansing and I have been making all kinds of observations to see what your children already know and where we should start directing our teaching. We had an excellent meeting on Friday morning to talk about individual student goals, and I am excited to jump in next week to help the children in these new ways. The individual goals range from writing names to following directions to learning how to calm their bodies down.

The children have enjoyed:

• Exploring their names (how many letters, what do they start with, letters they share with each other, etc.).
• Continuing to explore the interest areas.
• Pretending to be spies on the playground. (They even took notes as they spied on their friends!)
• Listening to the story Wemberly Worried by Kevin Henkes
• Acting out the story of Jesus walking on water during Faith Time
• Singing and dancing to Tooty-Ta and the Penguin Dance

I sent home three important papers on Thursday. (I forgot to send them home with the M/W three year-olds, so I will send them home with them next Wednesday.) The first paper explains our star student sharing program. Please make sure you take note of your child's week! The second paper is our snack calendar for the next month. The third paper is a list of the learning objectives for this year. These objectives are yours to hang on to. They are the basis to what we will be teaching your children throughout the year.

Have a super, long weekend! I'll see you all on Tuesday or Wednesday!