This week we began talking about scissor skills. The children have spent time working with play dough over the past few weeks, rolling balls and snakes and strengthening their hands. They also practiced picking up items with tweezers and were finally introduced to how to hold scissors using those made to cut play dough.
Family:
This week we began discussing our families. The children shared their family photo albums with one another and talked about the members of their family. The children used color squares to show the number of people that live in their house and then tried to build models of their homes with wooden blocks.
In families, everyone works together to help one another. There are certain jobs that everyone can do. Here the students are washing dishes at the sensory table.
New to our Exploration time was the dollhouse. The children worked cooperatively to set up the different rooms in the dollhouse and then acted out scenes with the family dolls. This was a great opportunity for the children to practice their sharing words that we have been discussing. For example, "May I have a turn with that?" As a group we read the book Sharing Time by Elizabeth Verdick and practiced sharing words and possible scenarios during play. It is wonderful to see them put these skills into action.
As we continue to discuss what makes each of us unique, the students learned that information can be shown visually using graphs. Below are two graphs that the children created. The first graph shows eye color and the second graph shows the siblings in our class. The children placed their picture under the visual that represented them. It was exciting to hear the conclusions that the students were able to draw about the class from looking at these graphs.
As the students become more comfortable with school and each other, we are seeing more interactive play.
The children are also beginning to take greater risks, demonstrating increased self confidence. They are turning "I need help!" into "Look at me!"
