Okay - so I'm finally finishing up this post. This was done right after the Letter Recognition one. We basically started into two letters per week after that one. This week was A and B.
We started with our circle and had each kid stand up, twirl around, and tell everyone their name. Some are more willing than others and some take a little while to come out of their shells - all expected! I had a puppet kid pack that I had gotten from the library (which I totally forgot to take a picture of!), so I took out the finger puppets and moved to our lesson that focused on handling interpersonal relationships during potential conflict situations. Sounds deep, huh? Yeah, we talked about playing nicely with each other.
When a kid doesn't know how to swim, we teach them. When a kid doesn't know how to spell, we teach them. When a kid doesn't know how to do math, we teach them. When a kid doesn't know how to behave......we need to teach them. I know you don't - but there are people that simply punish a child when they don't know how to behave. For example, one child is playing with a truck and another child comes up and takes it from them because they wanted it. The other child hits the one that took it. Then one or both children get in trouble. That first kid needed to be given the tools to know what to do in that first situation - as did the second.
I got these print outs when I was doing continuing education stuff for child care in Maryland. It shows kids what the options are when they are presented with a tough situation, like the one I described. In my class, they suggested laminating them and attaching them with to a ring. Then, when you're observing the kids and see a situation that this would apply to, you go over with the cards and encourage the kids to look through and pick an option for how they want to solve the problem. So I used finger puppets and tried to talk it out with them - on finger puppet having a toy that the other one wanted. What options did the one that wanted the toy have? Ask nicely for it. Ask if they can play with it together. See if they might want to trade. Wait and take turns. One important part is also teaching the kids that it is okay if the other kid says "No" - just because you ask for something doesn't mean you get it. The kids were kind of glazed over with this - it would have been much more effective if I had them act it out. I'll probably try to visit this again and have them play out the scenarios.
Then they needed to wiggle. I had one of the parents print and cut out a bunch of apples to use in one of our centers. Before that, I handed them out to the kids and read some rhymes for them to listen and follow along to. "You have an apple, it is red. Put the apple on your HEAD!" All the kids then had to put the apple on their head. "An apple is round, as you can see. Put the apple on you KNEE!" So on and so on. You can come up with lots of different ones. I think we also did a music thing, but honestly can't remember at this point. Probably a "Freeze" type song - all the kids dance and then have to freeze when the music stops and start dancing again when it starts back up.
Then we did centers.
They had to put the acorns in the appropriate basket. Big A or little a.
Seemed to be a popular one.
One center had a print out and they had to color the bird blue, apple red, frog green and the sun yellow.
There were also little finger puppets I had glued together the night before for them to color. A for Aligator and B for Bear.
Another station had them picking the apples with "A" off the tree.
There were also bananas with Big B's and little b's on them (forgot to take a picture) and the kids had to sort them, putting the little b bunch together and the Big B bunch together.
The last center was just building a tower with red blocks.
Then it was time for a snack!
There were red strawberries, red peppers and red tomatoes. Mmmmmmm.
Then play time! (And Mom chat time!)
What a great job you're doing!
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