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MaeBelle Living Memories: A Girl and Her Pottery

MaeBelle Living Memories: A Girl and Her Pottery: "My daughter has a knack for the natural life. One Sunday afternoon we went on a clay seeking journey down our road. I should have taken snap..."

Not Your Average Lunch Tray

Last night my friend, sidekick, coworker facilitated a workshop on Totally Terrific Trays based on all learning domains. She has been gathering and gathering supplies to make any one's tray totally terrific play! Keeping preschoolers interested and focused is a task for all of us, but making learning fun, interesting and fantastic will spark interest, curiosity, and inventiveness like nobody business!

Trays are wonderful because they not only allow for play, but they also teach self control, spacial awareness, and you can cover as many standards as your heart desire.

Organization is key and in the following photos, you will see just how simple it is to organize materials that makes tray play a sensation!

Setting these trays up for play takes skill, organization, and pre-planning. Don't think on Monday you're going pull materials and set these up. Tray play should be well planned and pre-planned, if possible weeks in advance. For those teachable moments where the children have inspired you, and there will be many, plan to gather the materials as quick as possible and then set those trays up as soon as possible to ensure you do not lose that moment of learning that has peeked their curiosity.

As Janie says, you are the facilitator and the children are the participates. Give them directions for the play, but do not show them what to do. Allow their imagination and approaches to learning rule the tray. They may find even more ways to play in their tray and they could be even better than your ideas! Children are curious by nature and some of the ways that they come up with play is awesome. That's the power of learning.

In these next photos you are going to see some play at work by big people.

Here she is matching the alphabet pasta with the card. Notice the spoons? Twelve for $1 at the Dollar Tree! Too cute.

Leaving the grid blank allows for creativity. They can also use markers to write on the laminated material incorporating writing skills into this math activity. Use a magic eraser to remove marker from laminated material; it's magic plus it promotes independence by the children.

Fine motor is so important for early childhood and using tongs and tweezers is a great way to develop those skills.

Leaf Man is one of our favorite books. The kids go crazy over this book! Find books that you can build units upon, take field trips with, and go beyond imagination with.

Magnetic letters and cookie sheets are essential in a preschool classroom. Cheap, but fully effective.

You can see just how easy it is to set tray play up in your classroom. Stay organized, be open to learning yourself, allow the children to navigate the trays and you will find yourself and your children open to so many possibilities.

Here's a thought...the week before ask your children what type of tray play they would like to have the following week. Chart their responses and get to work on THEIR ideas. Don't forget to recycle, recycle, recycle because as you can see you will need lots of storage. Don't throw away anything that can hold a pom-pom!

Thanks Janie for a wonderful night of learning, as always awesome job.

Professional Development

As I get ready to head down south to Orlando, Florida to the FLAEYC Conference, I want to share some thoughts about professional development.

This is a very important aspect to the job at hand and to the future that we are helping to create and form. I stress to you that you can only grow, nurture, and inspire if you grow, nurture, and inspire yourself. It is hard sometimes to get to the workshops held at your local coalition or other early childhood central agencies. It is expensive to attend state or national conferences. Seek external help from your local central agency, look for sponsorships that may be associated with the conference, and bunk up! These conferences are worth your time, so get some gals together and share a room.

Even though there are more convenient ways of earning your in-service hours or CEUs, like the Internet, please be aware that they may not always deliver the valuable hands-on experiences that you seek. Just as our kids learn through sensory, so do we. Try doing half and half and see if that works for you and meets your needs.

Stay inspired out there and until next time...go teach the children!

Below are some of the pictures from a training that I facilitated titled, "From Blah and Boring to Learning and Soaring", how to set you classroom at a higher standard of learning. I enjoyed the training so much that I shared it at One Goal Summer Conference in Tampa, Florida this past summer.

As we look at lesson planning, we can't help but to also look at how our program is implementing these plans. How are we setting the stage for learning? Where are we getting our information from that causes us to write those words in those squares?

The trigger to all lesson planning should come from observations, assessments, curriculum needs, adaptations, program evaluations and much more that reaches far beyond the paper that we print on. This is a term that continues to rapidly become a part of early childhood vocabulary, intentional teaching.

I have been saying it for some time now; you should always have a purpose in everything that you do in your classroom as a teacher and through your program as a director. Why are you planning? How can you make adaptations and meet the needs of the children if you haven't did any observations? And, more so, how are you planning anything without making those observations?

To truly complete a lesson plan, you should first consider your children, where they are at the time you are planning, make decisions based upon observations and assessments that have been done recently, and have a reason for putting your pen to the paper.

I will soon be training a workshop titled "Finding the Intentional Teacher In You". I will be excited to share some of that information with you.

Look forward to spending more time with you all on my blog. If you have preschool friends, please invite them and post comments. I am always happy to answer questions.

 I will explain more in depth what these pictures are...think about your preschool environment and how you are implementing your lesson plans in that environment. Can you tell me a theme, color, and letter for this environment?

It's Been Forever

I know that it has been a while since I have posted. Life gets hectic sometimes and gets in the way of us doing things that we enjoy-hobbies!

I will continue the lesson planning conversation soon. I am actually getting prepared to present it at One Goal Summer conference held in Tampa, Florida. I am very excited to be bringing my little bit of knowledge to the big city!

Stay tuned because I will also learn a lot of new information as I attend One Goal and will post some of my thoughts after my trip.

Until then...go and teach the children!

Slideshare

http://tinyurl.com/y9nr7xr

Preschool Lesson Plans Part 1

Preschool teachers are often misled about lesson planning, in turn, they become intimidated by them. I have seen it time and time again. Lesson planning in a preschool classroom can be a lot of fun for you and your children. Here are just a few ideas...

First, think of lesson planning as a story that will unfold Monday through Friday. Think about the beginning, the middle and the end. I love to start by webbing out ideas and going from last week or last month's observations of task activities that were observed. The power of observation is powerful itself and should be at the forefront of your lesson planning. We'll talk about observations and their importance another day, but know that you shouldn't complete a lesson plan without them.

Let's go back to the beginning. Why are you completing a lesson plan? Are you wanting to make your boss happy, your inspector happy, possibly a co-teacher? You should be planning for your children and yourself. A classroom without a plan is a problem waiting to happen. Have you ever hear the term enabler? By not planning, you are the enabler to complete chaos.

So how do you start? Going back to the webbing. I like to web because it starts with an idea and weaves itself into something bigger. Take for instance the winter theme. Suddenly the winter theme has turned into a whole week about hibernating animals and their environments. Webbing helps you to take an idea and narrow it down into a weekly unit. Then from there, you can web ideas about the animals, science experiments, environment changes, math, literacy, and so on.

The middle should contain your substance. The materials, the changes to the environment (did you know that your room should not look the same from week to week and that Friday should look totally different from Monday), and the presentation and deliverance of your unit to the children.

The end should be what your objective was at the beginning of the week. What did your children learn? Did you set out to accomplish what you wanted when you started this plan? Everything you do in your classroom should have an objective and an outcome. Will it work every time? No! That's the experiment in it all.

There is so much to say about lesson planning and so much more that I will be giving you that I will break this information down into parts. I will also be giving you some different tools to work with when we are finished with all parts of this conversation and in the end I hope that you learn something spectacular about lesson planning in preschool classroom.

Preschool Lesson Planning Coming Soon

Do you ever feel frustrated with lesson planning? Are you intimidated by them?

In the coming weeks I will be posting training information on how you can develop lesson plans that will send your classroom learning experiences through the roof. I want you to know that lesson planning does not have to be so hard and so time consuming and so expensive. I will show you how to create a unit on a shoe string budget and still get fantastic learning results for your children. Until then...

Some great pics from past trainings

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=42699&l=53522088aa&id=100000664307647

Let's Play Dough

I will begin to post some of the past trainings that I have done. These are the power point slide shows that accompanied the training. Please feel free to take a look at them and enjoy.  Play dough can be such a powerful tool in the preschool classroom. I will post recipes soon.
http://apps.facebook.com/slideshare/slideshows/user/100000664307647

Lesson Plans for Preschool

Next month I will be facilitating a training that will focus on lesson planning in the preschool classroom. Why is it that we let them imtimidate us so? This workshop will change the way that we approach them and transfer those great ideas to paper.

I will focus on how our classrooms are like the butterfly and the transition that it takes before it is what it is, "one of God's most beautiful creatures".

Check back soon for my link between the two and what both of them have to do with lesson planning.

Writing in the Preschool Classroom

When we think of writing, we think of letters and numbers that we can read and that make sense, otherwise why would you read it.

Writing in a preschool classroom is much different from our everyday writing. It seems to only make sense-at times-to the writer, can only be read by the writer, and can-at times-only be seen by the writer. What kind of writing is this, you ask? It is the writings of a preschool child. Their imaginations have taken over and their words begin to make sense when they can apply it to paper.

Here’s the catch...Have you ever seen a child come out of the womb writing letters and symbols that are aesthetically correct? If so, you have witnessed a miracle. The fact remains like any other developmental milestone, writing is a developmental progression that takes years to master. And this is why writing-rich classrooms are so important.

Writing Centers are specific areas within the classroom that encourage writing by providing interesting writing materials and appropriate models. Tracing letters are not appropriate. Focus on free-form writing.

Class Books allow each child to contribute an individual page to a group book. Sometimes the basic text is predictable but allow children to make small changes.

Pocket Stories encourage children to explore word boundaries and the relationship between spoken and written language. Children dictate a sentence to go with a picture they create. Duplicate words can be matched to the words in their sentence and stored in the pocket at the bottom of the page.

Journal Writing is common in many kindergartens. Journals allow teachers and children to trace writing progress over an extended period.

Sentence Fill-Ins allow children to experiment with writing by adding a word or phrase to a predictable text. Children can observe how their writing alters the meaning of the original text.

Writing on Interactive Charts enables children to experiment with the way writing conveys meaning. Children can write a word or phrase to add to the interactive part of the chart.

Literacy Suitcases extend the literacy curriculum from school to home. Literacy suitcases are take-home version of classroom writing materials.

It is extremely important at the preschool level for children to interact with print. This means that your classroom should be a print-rich environment. Children should be allowed to explore books and printed materials on their own and as a group. There should ALWAYS be printed materials on their physical and developmental level in the classroom. They should ALWAYS have access to writing materials at a specific place in the room. Use an old table or even a corner of the room with a basket of materials, a clipboard and a chair or bean bag. Even if we don’t have the luxury of space and new furniture, there is always something that can be used for this purpose. Materials could include: pencils, crayons, markers, paper of any kind, magnetic boards, magnetic letters or laminated letters that they can stick to Velcro on the wall to form words. Anything in your classroom can and should be used to enhance the reading and writing experience.

To further the writing experience, materials should be present in each center in your classroom. Examples could be notepads for order taking in the home living center, pads for drawing buildings in the construction/block area, or paper to write hypothesis and experimental thinking in the science center.

Take this new year to begin thinking about how you can incorporate a developmentally, fantastic writing center into your classroom. Enhancing the writing experience will make a dramatic difference in your children’s ability to begin recognition of letters, phonemic awareness, and of course writing.

Organized Chaos in the Preschool Classroom

Well, we are actually in our first week of school, so pre planning didn't get blogged. That tells you just how busy I have been. It has been a whirlwind during the past two weeks and I am tired to say the least.

During the week of pre planning I had a lot to go through, organize and get rid of. I took over a site, so I basically had to start from scratch. When our classrooms are cluttered, it creates a chaos that can not be described. Much like our homes, when we remove the clutter from our lives they seem to simplify themselves.

As an early childhood teacher, you have to be organized. The preschool classroom is not a place for scattered thoughts. When children arrive in the morning, you have to be ready, when you go out onto the playground, you have to be ready, when they wake up from their naps, you have to be ready; do you get what I'm saying?

When you begin your lesson plans, think in units or themes. Have those items prepared ahead of time down to the outdoor activities that will accompany you. I like to use 2-gallon zip lock bags for outdoor activities. I place a label on the bag and it will go with me in line with the children. Organize your sand table and water table themed objects and activities in those bags, you will see a big difference in your transitions.

Again with the lesson plans, think in themes. Have things organized into bins or large bags labeled with your theme for that week or month. Do lesson plans two weeks in advance at least, so that items can be purchased and prepared in advance with time to spare if something comes up. We know that our days never go as planned, so being organized is key.


Now onto setting up your classroom. The environment for a child is essential in the learning process. There should be at least these learning centers in your classroom: writing, math/science, home living, art, blocks/transportation, library, and circle time learning area. Some to add are: wood working, computers, and listening. You should have sensory tables or bins in your setting daily. These sensory tubs and micro play activities are key in behavior modification and personal space recognition. If you have any questions about sensory play or micro play, please post them and I will get back to you as soon as possible. I will be writing a blog about micro play in the near future.

Until the next time we meet, remember that little lives are depending on you...