I feel like it's been so long since I've written an official blog entry. It's great to be back on here telling you all about our weekly adventures! As you know, we've been doing a lot during the past few weeks. Mainly, learning about all these wonderful Jewish holidays that we've been celebrating. With a new month here, we decided to dive into a new exploration. As with all of our new explorations, we talk about the children's interests and allow the class to pick one. This week the kids voted on DIRT! This did not surprise us at all. The kids have become obsessed with digging and rolling in the dirt on the playground...as I'm sure you can tell from the condition of shoes and clothes when you pick up :) I don't think I've had a class as excited about digging. They are so much fun!
As always, we started by talking about what we know about dirt and some ways we enjoy playing in the dirt. We've been spending time on the playground digging and using our imaginations. This week we've made roads with dirt and trucks. We've also opened up bakeries and restaurants, as well as digging for fossils and artifacts! As we've been digging outside, we've noticed how the consistency of the dirt changes the deeper we dig. This has opened up discussions of different types of dirt and how they can be used differently. We've also been finding tons of rocks! I feel like this exploration may extend into rocks since the kids have started quite the collection, but we'll see. Here is a list of some things the kids have noticed about dirt this week...
- worm live in dirt
- you put seeds in it
- you plant flowers in it
- you plant trees in it
- you can dig with shovels and sticks
- you can dig a big hole in it
- you can play in it
- dirt makes you dirty!
- clay is in dirt
- sand is in dirt
- worms can slide through it
- you can use dump trucks in it
- you can make mud pies with it
- water and dirt make mud
- dirt makes bug come out when it rains
Along with all the playing we've been doing with dirt, we've also been using dirt in different ways throughout our center time. One activity we did was put dirt in shallow bins for the kids to write and draw in. Some children chose to use their fingers while others used sticks. We laid out all of our "heart" words (or frequently used words that we're learning to recognize and spell). This was a great way for them to practice learning these new words as well as work on their names. Others enjoyed drawing pictures and playing made up games with friends in the dirt.
We also did some painting with dirt this week! We put our dirt paint in a bucket and let the kids use their hands to paint a picture with it. It was great, messy fun! As we painted, we talked about how the dirt felt, smelled, looked, and it's importance to our environment. This was more of a sensory activity than anything, but they really enjoyed making art with a new medium. We will probably pull this out throughout the rest of the year. It was a hit! It was also a great time for us to discuss dirt and what we'd like to learn about it.
Speaking of sensory item, we got off track with the dirt one day this week when we discovered water beads! If you haven't heard of them before, they are VERY tiny little beads of different colors. As they soak in water, they expand in size and turn into soft, slippery, balls that have been a blast to play with. Even I could sit there all center time and play with them! The kids have explored them using the light table, magnifying glasses, and have also enjoyed sorting them. They're also extremely bouncy, which of course the kids have loved! When we first pulled them out, they were new to all of us. We weren't sure exactly how big they would get or what would happen so we made some hypothesis and let them kids cover them in water. They really enjoyed watching them grow throughout the day. Feel free to go into our science center and feel them. They're a lot of fun!
We'll be doing a lot more with dirt next week! I will try to remember to send out an email this week, but we are planning to go into the woods on Monday. This won't be a typical day in the woods. We are going to let the kids go crazy in the dirt and bring back plenty of soil samples. There is a lot of mud out there so please make sure you bring an extra pair of clothes and shoes, as we expect to get completely filthy! We're excited to see how it goes!
Love,
Ms. Rachael
Approaches to Learning:
- Demonstrate growing ability to predict possible outcomes based on prior experiences and knowledge.
- Demonstrate increasing ability to use prior knowledge to understand new experiences.
- Represent prior events and personal experiences in one or more ways.
- Try to solve problems encountered in play.
- Demonstrate an increasing ability to follow through with tasks and activities.
- Interact easily with familiar adults by engaging in conversations, responding to questions and following direction.
- Participate in group life of class.
- Demonstrate strategies to join play group with adult support.
- Recognize effect on others of own behavior most of the time.
- Manage transitions positively when told what to expect.
- Show interest in informational texts about familiar objects.
- Retell one or town events from a story read aloud.
- Begin to identify significant words from text read aloud.
- Explore books independently.
- Incorporate information from informational texts into play activities.
- Begin to understand the relationship between oral language and written language.
- use drawings, letters, or words to create narratives about people and things in their environment.
- Investigate solutions to simple problems.
- Classify objects in their environment by color, shape, size, or function.
- Begin to show an awareness of numbers in the environment.
- Sort and classify objects by one attribute.
- Represent simple two-dimensional geometric shapes.
Exploring our awesome water beads!...
Dirt is our new favorite way to paint...
Busy baking and building roads...
Literacy and art with dirt!...
Sweet friends playing and learning...
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