September 30, 2012

Wow!

What happened to the month of September? It is gone in a blink of the eye!
 

ABC Centre

In the ABC Centre the children will be working on stamping their name and the names of two other children. This will assist the children to recognize and identify the letters of the alphabet, as well as the letters in their name. It will also assist the children to know that names begin with an uppercase letter and the other letters are lowercase letters.
When working with some children in the ABC centre I noticed that some of the children experienced difficulty matching the lowercase letter with the uppercase letters. Therefore, I have developed some games that are at the centre in order to enhance the children's learning of this skill.

 

Construction Centre

In this centre the children have been busy designing, experimenting and discovering ways to make the particular structure stable. In their words:

A stable structure needs have a wide strong base, without this the structure is not stable which means it will fall down.

The other day the children were in the construction area building "a city". I asked them how they knew it was a city. They told me: "because it has roads and we are pretending that this is a sidewalk". Suddenly, Gregory shouted, "wait this is not a city". I asked him why and he explained: "a city has houses, people, cars and other things." I decided to take advantage of this to offer all the children a learning opportunity about a city. We made a list of all the things that make a place a city.

These are some of their ideas:

- trees
- stores
- houses
- apartments
- school
- traffic lights
- cars
- roads
The children asked me if I would buy these things for their city. I explained that it would cost too much. Finn shared that we could make them from paper.
I stated the problem: how will people, trees, houses stand up. Morgan stated we can put them on sticks (popsicle sticks and play dough). So the next day the children worked diligently making tree, houses, apartments, people and other props for the city.
This centre has become very popular with the boys and girls. The communication and problem solving that is happening is rich. I love how involved the children become in creating a solution to our problem.