Who knew 4 year olds could be technologically savvy?!

While reading through this weeks class notes and things to explore, I noticed that some of the suggested websites are those my children spend time visiting each day. During my literacy block in the morning, my children rotate through centers and one that they go to each day is the computer center. When they are there they can choose to visit starfall or pbs kids. It amazes me how different the world is today. The fact that we have children in preschool who are learning how to operate computers, the keyboard and the mouse blows my mind.

I hope this screenshot helps viewers see the different activities children can participate in when they first visit the site. For some of my children who are still working on letter and sound identification, they visit the ABC's page. I have some children however who are beginning to read and some who are already reading and for them this is a great tool as well to look at different books.

Valentine's Day Ideas for Prek

With Valentine's Day coming up this week, on my to do list this weekend was finding activities to implement. While looking at another blog I came across a great link to follow! Thanks so much for sharing! I also found some great ideas on pinterest. 

I thought this would be a great home/school connection. To send a heart home with each child, and have  them talk with their mom/dad or guardian about  what love means to them. While keeping in mind that some children would come back to school with their hearts not filled out in which case I will fill one out with them. 

I also found this activity on pinterest which I thought was great. We work so much on COG 6-relates number to quantity from the CT Preschool Frameworks and this would be a fun activity for them to use that day or maybe even the whole week. 

Stuck on math ideas for the classroom?! Look no further!

As a follow up to my animoto, I wanted to share what I did with my students most recently. Just last week we focused on patterning, recognizing a pattern, extending a pattern and creating patterns of our own as it is another skill measured on the district wide assessment. In a recent professional development session which focused on authentic math activities, I saw this idea and implemented it within my own classroom. It was amazing to see how successful the children were and the overall engagement. I thought I would share a few of the pictures! It was a very quick assessment for me as well. I was able to see who was able to extend a pattern with one, or extend a pattern by adding two more. I was also able to see who was able to create their own pattern. After we worked with the fruit manipulatives children were able to pattern with real strawberries and bananas. See below for AB patterns as well as ABB patterns.What do you think?!

Making Our Own Pizza!

In preschool one of the skills tested on the district wide math assessment is following steps; first, then, next and last. Each Friday we participate in a cooking activity which requires children to look at and follow a recipe. We talk about each of the ingredients, how much of each ingredient is used and the steps that are taken when following a recipe. We have made our own play dough, followed the steps (first,then, next and last) and talked about measuring proper amounts of each ingredient. The following week we made our own english muffin pizzas. We read the book, The Little Red Hen Makes a Pizza which was part of our curriculum. To couple math with this literature, we made our own pizza and practiced following the steps using the language first, then, next and last.

A young girls creative spin on digital storytelling

I liked this example of digital storytelling. This young girl decided to use digital storytelling to talk about getting out of the classroom. How bored she was in geography class, how much longer she had to wait until lunch and recess, how much longer she had left in the school day and how she would rather be home watching TV.  I thought it was a young students own creative way to use digital storytelling, or telling a story with voice and pictures and no words.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9OvmyTOPAE

What might a preschooler see when they look at this?

I found this image as well and wanted to add it to my visual art blog previously.

Inspired-How does a 4 year old view art?!

Teaching at an art's academy always leaves me trying to be as creative as possible and providing my students with rich visual art ideas and experiences. While viewing another preschool teachers blog I saw one example she found and used with her children. This got me thinking how I could use the image below in my own classroom, the questions I could pose to the children. What do you see when you look at this image? How would you create your own? I went ahead and searched some more images I may provide my children with to see what they spark inside of them.