Love

Celebrating Valentine's Day at school is something the children really enjoy.  We don't make a big deal of the commercial aspects, but we certainly take time to talk about God's love for us and our love for our families and each other. 

We had a good bit of heart art.

We had some beading with red, white and pink beads.

The most fun of all was exchanging valentines.  Each Bunny got to pass out his or valentines by placing one in each bag around the table.  This is not as simple as it sounds, by the way.  It was an excellent and motivating way to practice one-to-one correspondence.

We had darling store-bought cards, cards lovingly made at home, and cards with bible verses reminding us of God's love.  Each Bunny was very excited to take them home and read them.  As adults we can certainly remember that fun feeling of sitting down to look at all of our valentines.  We hope the Bunnies always know how much they are loved!

In the Background

Sometimes little, yet important things slip past our vision.

The most important thing about this photo is not the super cute Bunnies eating their snack...

...it's the two Bunny boys in the background referencing our alphabet poster.  We have never seen the children even notice that poster, and here are two kids clearing interacting with what they see depicted there.  Yay!

Creatures of Habit

These two do this....

every single morning.  First thing.

Carpentry

In our talks about Jesus as a little boy, the children learned that Jesus was a carpenter and he learned carpentry skills from his father, Joseph.  In the Bunny Rabbit class the children have frequent experience with wooden things.  To learn more about carpentry the children painted wood and created a class sculpture.  We're pretty sure Jesus didn't have plastic paintbrushes or wood glue, but still we recreated what basic carpentry was like.

We read a book about tools and what each tool does and then we had tools to try out.  The children are very familiar with hammers - we use them often!  They also got to try out sandpaper.  By far the most favorite tool was the hand drill.  Oh my, there was a long waiting list for that hand drill! 

At home, don't be afraid to put real tools in your children's hands.  With some simple safety demonstrations, they can be quite confident with tools.  Using the same tools that adults use gives the children confidence and a sense of control.  Go for it!

Growing Up

Marking birthdays is a significant builder of children's self worth.  It proves to them that their entrance into the world was so wonderful it is worth celebrating.  We celebrate birthdays in the Bunny Rabbit class in a non-traditional way.  We don't share a big sugary snack with party napkins and balloons and treats.  There are other environments for that kind of celebration.  At school we send home a birthday journal for each family to add a photo and a simple explanation of how they celebrated the child's birthday.  The ways people celebrate birthdays are as varied as can possibly be!  Over the years we have read of simple poignant celebrations of grateful prayers offered on behalf of the child.  We have read of elaborate birthday parties with children, food and entertainment at every turn.  And we have read of everything in between.  Each is significant in the life of a child and we learn so much about families by sharing the journal.

Unfortunately we don't know how or even IF Jesus' family celebrated his miraculous birth and birthday.  During our talks about Jesus' childhood, we noted that he had birthdays, and we had a little wooden cake in the class.  We didn't sing or make a big deal of it, but the children had fun assembling and decorating this little cake.

Guess What? Jesus Grew Up!!

Through the years we have learned that most children know Jesus was a tiny baby born in a stable.  They also know Jesus was a grownup who did wonderful things. 

Most of them are super surprised that Jesus was a little boy!

We have a fantastic book called If I Had Lived in Jesus' Time.  It shows drawings of modern life and ancient life.  It's perfect for comparing and contrasting they way we live today with the way Jesus lived.  The Bunnies were amazed that Jesus probably slept on a mat on the floor - no bed!!!  Jesus' mother, Mary, probably wove mats and she probably taught Jesus how.  In our class, the children learn to sew.  With the right tools, they can be very successful.

We use burlap, a large embroidery hoop, a plastic needle with a big eye, and some colorful yarn or other fibers.   We use simple repetitive directions like "Go up from the bottom and down through the top."  Easy and fun!

 This little Bunny, who normally is rather soft spoken, said "Mrs. O'Connor, I realllly like sewing!"

We will have sewing out from time to time for the rest of the year.  By May, we'll have a lovely colorful mat.

5 Little Monkeys

At SLC we have some fantastic prop bags that go with some of our favorite stories for children.  The 5 Little Monkeys is popular one because everyone knows the song and story so after a short large-group experience, they can have fun independently. 

One little Bunny was brave enough to put on the Mama mask and boy is she CUTE!

Puzzling

One Monday morning Mrs. Magee and Mrs. O'Connor put out a huge pile of puzzle pieces. 

From this ridiculous pile, the children are supposed to create 15 smaller word puzzles.  Each piece has part of a picture and one letter of one word.  We gave them minimal instruction and walked away.  Thinking this was a conceptual stretch for the Bunnies, we had very low expectations. But guess what?!  We noticed a number of children floating over to this activity and we saw exciting things!

This photo shows the work in progress and a short while later every puzzle was solved!  Each child just did a little and the next built upon the work of the previous child - sometimes alone and sometimes in duos or trios.  We were surprised and delighted and we will absolutely be doing more of this kind of activity!

Fun and Games

We have been gradually introducing the Bunnies to simple childhood games, and they are really loving them.  Playing games may seem very simplistic and basic, but you'd be surprised at how many skills are required, both to even grasp the concept and to be a participant.
Here's a small list:
sophisticated turn-taking
impulse control
ability to follow multi-step directions
a developing sense of fairness
directionality
delayed gratification
sportsmanship
perseverance
ability to hold more than one attribute in mind at a time
sequencing - both of actions and movement of play
understanding of cause and effect
well-developed receptive and expressive language

Wow - playing simple board games can have a big effect on development and it is a powerful way to build relationships in a family.  Try it at home!

Merry Christmas

Blessings to all of you for a very Merry Christmas!  We hope it is your best Christmas ever!

Block Play

Block play takes on many forms, but it's always exciting to see vertical creations.  Charlotte built the two identical structures and told us they were Mary and Joseph.

More Than Just Decorating

At Christmastime we have a little tree in our classroom that the children can decorate and undecorate as often as they'd like.  We typically have a few ornament making projects to offer over a few weeks, but the children are welcome to make their own ornaments at any time.
Besides being festive, there are solid reasons for children to make their own ornaments.  They have chances to express their creativity and fine tune their motor skills. 

Stringing beads is a developmental milestone, but let's face it, putting teeny beads on flimsy string is hard!  We use pipecleaners rather than string for beading.  It stays firm and then bends to any shape. 

We gave the children a variety of old Christmas greeting cards and some scissors and let them cut out images to make ornaments.  There are many levels of scissor skill development, but cutting out an image is one of the toughest. Some Bunnies can do it and others are still snipping.  No matter.  The opportunity and practice is what is important.

Christmas Math

The Bunnies had a great time with this game!  They had a large die with the typical dot patterns from 1 to 6.  They rolled the die and put the same number of pompom ornaments on the tree as was shown on the die.  Once the tree was full, they rolled the die and removed the number of ornaments indicated on the die. 

Simple and FUN and packed with math skills: one to one correspondence, pattern recognition, sequencing, concept of number, addition, subtraction.

Advent

Advent is a very exciting time.  It's the beginning of the liturgical year in the church and it's the time we can prepare ourselves for the coming of Jesus.  At school we spend time talking about angels - who they are and what they do.

In the months surrounding the birth of baby Jesus, angels visited Mary, Joseph and shepherds.  These people had good reason to be anxious, unsettled and impatient, and in each instance the angels delivered calmness, reassurance and a glimpse of heaven.  Angels are messengers from God! 

Keep your eyes open for messengers from God.  They appear in very unexpected places.

Making Tracks

You must see this!

Yes, the children are darling, but what's really cool here is the train track.  You can't quite see all of it, but it is an intricate layout with tracks running under bridges, several loops and it is completely closed in all aspects.  That means with only a teensy bit of help toward the end, these children and a few others built this elaborate track that has no beginning and no end and used EVERY piece of track we have in the room.  WOW!  This was one of those days when it hurt our hearts to put the toys away.  We wanted to leave this out forever!

Potential future careers: urban planning and engineering

Stone Soup

Every year right around Thanksgiving we read the story Stone Soup and make our own soup.



 This is our favorite version!



Stone Soup is an amazing story that has stood the test of time.  There are many versions of Stone Soup, but the lesson remains the same: sharing what we have makes us feel happy.

I absolutely adore Jon Muth's version because his art is spectacular.  The delicate Asian landscapes offer an airy and gentle path to understanding the story.

To reinforce the lesson of the story, the Bunny Rabbit children became chefs.  Each child brought an ingredient from home to contribute to the soup.  

It didn't take long before the soup started to smell delicious.

Oh, yes, we put a stone in the soup.  It's the main ingredient after all!  No worries, parents, we scrubbed it with soap before we put it in the pot.


We took the heavy pot to the kitchen to cook while we played.  We came in from the playground a bit early so we could eat our soup.  Mrs. O'Connor and Mrs. Magee were super proud of the Bunnies because everyone tasted the soup and only two children said they didn't like it.

Most kids gobbled it up and asked for more!

Outdoor Enrichment

Each week, Mrs. Boone has a great activity for the children on the playground.  In the photo here, she had six different herbs for the children to experience with their senses.  Most of them are growing right in our gardens!  It was really fun to stand back and watch the children touch, smell and taste and then comment.  A few of the children recognized herbs from their moms and dads cooking at home. 
On another day, Mrs. Boone brought turkey feathers and duck calls, deer antlers and pictures of other animals with antlers.  These are all simple activities yet they are very powerful reminders of just how much can be learned from the natural world.

Sand Art

One of the ways we learned about the ocean was to experience sand.  Of course children who regularly visit playgrounds and who live near the coast know all about sand. (Being that sand winds up on the floorboards of the car, mothers know all about it, too!)  All sand is not the same.  It can have a variety of textures and shapes and sometimes even a variety of colors.  The Bunnies used glue and colored sand to make art.  They had to squeeze glue out of bottles and aim it onto their boards, then they had to use their fingers to pinch up little bits of sand and drizzle it onto the glue.  Lastly, they had to shake off the excess sand.  This very simple and FUN activity gave the children specific fine motor practice.  Squeezing, pinching and shaking actions strengthen hand muscles and increase dexterity.

Opposites

If you are looking for some fun activities to do at home with your preschooler, consider some simple concept games.  Here is one Bunny matching some 2 piece puzzles which depict opposites.  The kids this age have the basic ones mastered - happy/sad, hot/cold, wet/dry.  However, there are many others that are more complex such as full/empty, young/old, far/near, wrapped/unwrapped, just to name a few.  Consider ways you can incorporate these concepts and vocabulary as you go about your everyday life.

The Great Pumpkin Experiment

Every year in Bunny class, we explore pumpkins as part of our experiences with plants God created for us.  Nobody really wants to put their hand in a pumpkin and pull out all the gooey seeds, so we just fill ours with dirt instead.

We dutifully watered our pumpkin with a spray bottle of water each day for a couple of weeks.  Then we took it outside and planted it in our garden where it did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.  Not even a single sprout.  So sad.  This is the first year our great pumpkin experiment failed miserably, but you know what?  We got to have interesting conversations about the possible reasons our seeds didn't sprout.  And we also got a little reminder that in the mysteries of the world God gave us, sometimes things don't grow.

Traffic

For a few weeks on the playground, the carts and buggies have been the toys of choice.  The Bunnies have been creating their own traffic rules and Dalton has been the primary overseer of the traffic.

Mrs. O'Connor and Mrs. Magee do not know the traffic rules, but we are certainly making sure everybody stays safe on the road.
While this may seem like mindless silly play, it is actually evidence of child-directed, highly organized cooperative play.  They came up with the idea and the adults had no role in it.  All of these children had to create and learn their own set of made up rules.  As a group they had to agree upon certain behaviors to maintain order (Everybody, drive this way!) and they had to negotiate their roles.  Doesn't this sound exactly like what goes on in a corporate office - new project, ground rules, maintain order and negotiate??  See!  It all starts in preschool.

Becoming Friends

Contrary to what many people believe, children do not make friends instantly.  Just like with adults, it takes time and trust.  Look what Mrs. Magee and I found in our small classroom library - two little Bunny girls curled up together under blankies.

It happens every October like clockwork - strangers become friends.

Fire Truck

Big excitement!  The fire truck and ambulance came to visit us at school.

This year, they actually had to make TWO visits.  The first one was super short because they had to dash off to help someone!  (That's why the people and clothes are slightly different in the pictures.)

One firefighter tried on his mask to show the children what it looked like.  See!  It's not scary.

The Bunnies even got to sit in the driver's seat and GUESS WHAT!  Firefighters wear seatbelts!

This year the Bunnies got to go in the ambulance to check it all out.  They saw the bed on wheels and all the medicine and bandages.  One of them commented that it looked like a doctor's office.  Great observation!

We love being able to interact with our community helpers.  Having real experiences with firefighters helps children understand their role in our community.

NOTE:  One of the most important concepts we emphasize is that firefighters uniforms are NOT scary and that if one of those guys ever comes to your house, DO NOT HIDE.  Children should jump out and say "Here I am!!"

Gardening

Exploring the outside world is an integral part of learning at SLC.  Beyond playing on our play equipment, the children have opportunities to garden.

Some of the gardening tasks would not be considered fun for adults - like picking weeds.  The children think it's great!  How many times do we tell them not to pull or pick things they see growing?  For weeding, it's the opposite.  They can pick and pull as much as they want.  I wonder, do the cute gloves make it easier or harder? :)

Playdough

We have one Bunny Rabbit in our class who is super interested in technology.  He uses playdough to make cell phones, and he makes calls, too.  Often we catch him with a playdough cell phone pressed to his ear just chattering away to no one.  Mrs. O'Connor and Mrs. Magee have seen playdough transform into many things, but a cell phone is a first for us!

Sun Prints

Part of any study of Creation is awareness of light and dark.  At the preschool level, experiences provide the scaffold for learning about light and dark in ways beyond simply noticing which is which.

The Bunnies learned about the effects of the sun by making sun prints.  Each child chose an ordinary object and placed it on a small piece of dark construction paper.  We placed the papers out in the sun for a day.

The next day we had fun discovering what the sun had done to our papers. We used the terms "light" and "dark" rather than "faded" to describe what happened. 

This is a super simple science experiment that can be repeated at home.  Try gathering random objects and even larger paper to make little collages.

An Important Ritual

Here is our first fire drill.  Look how nicely everyone is positioned on the yellow line.  Yay Bunnies!

Science - Preschool Style

There are so many important science concepts that very young children can grasp.  Discovering and labeling attributes of objects is a major one.  It's a skill children will use throughout their school lives.

We started with the attributes of hard and soft.  Seems simple, right?  We began with just two objects - a wooden stick and a cotton ball.  Each child got to have their own and squeeeeeze them as tightly as they could.  Then they decided which was hard and which was soft.  Easy!  Then we had a whole bag of objects.  Each child got one and had to decide if it was hard or soft and put it in a ring to create a set.
The photo above shows the next day when the children got to practice independently.  The blue bin on the left had all the objects.  The blue ring was for hard things and the yellow ring was for soft things.  You can see the boys are successfully sorting.  There is a wooden bead and a cork in the blue ring and a cotton ball and a sponge in the yellow ring.  Way to go, Bunny boys!

We'll do much more of this type of activity throughout the year.  Next up: sink and float.

Block Play

Are you surprised to know that block play has some very well defined developmental steps?  The ability to build horizontally, vertically, and to build enclosures are all steps in spatial development.  In our class, we have children at all levels.

I will say that already this year, we have more children building vertically than we've ever had before.

By the time spring rolls around, this group is going to knock our socks off with their structures!

Opportunities

Many of the toys we have at school at just like the toys families have at home.  At home there is typically only one or two children playing with a toy at a time.  However, at school we may have five or six children playing with the same toys at the same time, and that presents opportunities - opportunities to compromise, opportunities to take a lead, opportunities to be led, opportunities to become friends, opportunities to negotiate and opportunities to resolve conflicts.  We take advantage of all of those opportunities!

Creation

During the fall semester, the Bunny Rabbits will be learning about creation.  One of the best ways for children to learn about creation is to allow them to be creators.

The Bunnies had the chance to play with colorful, translucent objects on a light table.  They were able to observe how the light shone through various colors and shapes and they created many different ways to arrange them on the light table. 

We have other ways to explore light and dark in our class, including the day and night lights God gave us - sun, moon and stars.

The Beginning

The first few days of class are about exploration.

We have new materials to learn how to use and we also explore the ways to put them away.

We have new toys to explore.  Some of our toys are games and we learn the simple rules.  Our games aren't competitive and when there is no winner and no loser, we are free to explore ways to work as a team and ways to persevere.

Exploring is one of the key ingredients to learning through play.

Welcome

It's a new year in Bunny Rabbit Class!

Mrs. Magee and Mrs. O'Connor have had fun getting to know the newest little bunnies.  We're going to have fun!

Thank You

What wonderful Christmas gifts we received from our precious Bunnies!  Thank you to all of you and we hope 2012 is your best year yet!
Love,
Mrs. O'Connor and Mrs. Magee