Snowflakes
Snow had finally come this week and this was an exciting topic with the children, so I decided to use it in our project.
We recieved another letter from Teddy where he told us that he also had discovered the snow while vacationing in the forest. He had seen that the snow consists of tiny tiny snowflakes and we talked about this with the children and I asked the question what would happen to the snow if we brought it inside with us?
The answers I got was: "It would melt because it's too hot in here" "It would melt"
So we got some snow and watched for snowflakes. The children got to feel the snow in their hands and determend that it's cold and that their thesis was correct; the snow started to melt in their hands.
After this we created our own snowflakes. I had typed out snowflakes from clipart that they got to paint and then we put some glue on them and sprinkled glitter on our snowflakes. They are so beautiful in the windows!
Unfortunately the real snow didn't stick around very long, it melted just as fast as the snow inside...
The first candle
Today we celebrated first Advent by "lighting" the first candle, and now it's an offical countdown till christmas! : )
After this we sang christmas songs and ate some fruit.
Just love christmas, can't wait!!! :)
Reflecting & Writing
To continue on our project the forest/Teddy we started the week with watching a film that I made.
I made it in "Photostory" and used pictures on the children from when we first got the letters and when we collected cones in the forest and painted the cones. I must say that I love "Photostory", it's such a great program to make films. It's easy, quick and fun! And the result feels so professional :)
In this film I was the vioce for Teddy and he wanted to thank the children for helping him out. We watched the film twice and the reply from the children was amasing, they seemed to love it and they now ask for Teddy every day.
Yesterday the children got to paint something from when we collected the cones or when we painted them. This activity and the film were suppose to give them he opportunity to reflect.
The pre school should strive for that every child:
Develops an understanding for listening, reflecting and expressing own perception and try to understand
other perspectives than the own, (p. 10 Swedish curriculum Lpfö98)
Today my colleague had planned an exciting gathering where we discussed our letters, sang the alfabet song and the children got to go on a letter hunt. My colleague had placed letters everywhere in the room and the children where super excited over collecting theese. After writing several messages to Teddy on the whiteboard the children got to right on both paper and the computer. We have a lot of younger children but this was a fun way to try this out and to get to know our letters and we discussed which letter our name starts with.
We got this mailbox this week. So now we can really answer Teddy's letters : )
On a mission
The Children were so focused when we visited the forest this week. They talked about it all morning:
"We´re going to collect cones for Teddy".
On the way there we sang the "Elephant song" and found a beautiful branch, covered with frost:
When we arrived to our spot the started collecting cones and they thought it was so much fun that they didn't only collect 2 each, we had the whole basket full : )
Yesterday a new letter from Teddy arrived where he asked if we wanted to help him decorate the cones so that they would look more beautiful. Of course the children wanted to help Teddy and we painted the cones in lovely colors as you can see;
Incoming letter
Today at our daily gathering on the carpet, something odd and exciting happended:
We recieved a letter. A big envelope with both a letter and 2 pictures in it.
The letter were from our little friend "Teddy". (Teddy is a small teddybear that always says god morning to the children and they love him).
Teddy wrote to tell us that he's on a vacation in the forest, visiting his friends; the moose, spider, snake, bird and he told us of his new hobbie; collecting cones. Evedently he's trying to collect as many as he can but he finds it difficult to bring them all back to us. So he asked us for help:
Can you help me collect 2 cones each from the forest and bring them back to the kindergarten?
Super exciting and the children had big eyes when the letter arrived this morning. So, tomorrow we're going to the forest to collect cones and we will see what happends later...
Animal singing
Today, before lunch, I gathered the children on the carpet to sing some songs.
It felt like the right time because they were hungry and we had some time before lunch would be ready.
To make it more fun I used our "Flano" board and some of our animals with velcro on the back.
We talked about the different animals; what there called, how they sound and we sang songs about the animals.
We sang songs about all of theese animals and when we sang the song about the jumping monkey's we also talked some math and counted the monkey's.
Really a great gathering and happy children before lunch!
Math through Lego
This week I had planned an educational gathering where we alla sat down with the purpose:
That the children will have the opportunity to develop an understanding for counting, number sequence, amount and sorting. (p. 10 in the Swedish curriculum)
We started by asking the children how many fingers we have on one hand and we got 5 as an answer. When we asked how they knew that, a girl of 5 years old answered that she knew this because she has 5 toes in one foot. (Great that she had seen the connection) We then put out 5 Lego blocks on the carpet, putting signs with the numbers 1-5 on them next to the blocks, this to make it clearly for the children to see the connection between the numbers and the amount of blocks.
After counting the blocks we put the blocks in 2 piles and asked the children in which pile there were more blocks, they instintly knew which one and we asked how they knew this?
"Because this one has 2 blocks and the other 3" they answered.
We then added smaller Lego blocks in to one of the piles and asked the same question. We did this to see if the children would answer differently depending on different sizes. But the answer were the same.
After the gathering we devided the children into 3 groups, after their age and we also used different types of Lego depending on their age. With the oldest children we used small Lego and they got the mission to build something exciting:
How would you build a banana with Lego?
The resulalt was amazing!! One boy built a banana boat that you can see abroad.
With the youngest children we used the big and soft Lego blocks that you can see in the picture and they built big towers and talked about the colors. With the middle group which is my group we used Duplo Lego with which we built different towers, counted different colors and blocks and we sorted the blocks after their colors.
The whole section where I work was involved in math and it was just great seeing how excited the children were about it, Lego is a great playful material to use with children in learning math!
Inspirationssdag
I veckan hade vi en inspirationsdag med IKT som var så otroligt givande!
Vi satt länge men dagen gick så fort just för att det var så kul!!! : )
Vi fick lyssna på Anna Mahdessian från Microsoft som gav goda exempel på hur man kan använda IKT på olika sätt med barn i förskolan. Hon gav tips på något som jag verkligen fastnade för och som jag just nu har laddat hem gratis: Onenote. Det är ett dokument för oss pedagoger att dokumentera i och skulle fungera utmärkt att ha under utvecklingssamtal! Man kan skriva var som helst i dokumentet bara genom att klicka i det och programmet tar alla filer! Man kan alltså enkelt klicka någonstans och t.ex. lägga in en photostory man gjort med barnet eller lägga in en sång man gjort. Den har även en översättningsfunktion och möjlighet att kunna delas via internet till föräldrar. Spännande att prova detta!!!
Vi fick också inspiration med Joachim Thornström från Ystad som tipsade om olika appar/program som man kan använda som verktyg för barns lärande. Det finns många bra att använda t.ex. för barns språkutveckling: Radioapan, Rimrum eller Tunggung.
Vår duktiga IKT grupp var också upp på scen och presenterade vårt arbete, ni är bäst tjejer!
Jätte härlig dag som gav mycket inspiration, nu vill jag köra igång med precis ALLT! : )
/Anna.
