Moments in Learning

Today we took our first class walk on campus!  We had excellent family volunteers and we walked over to the Horticulture area.  The teacher took photos of plants the children liked during the walk.  So far the teachers have noticed that the children talk about flowers the most.  When we asked what to plant in our garden at school, a large portion of the children said “flowers” of some sort.  The children asked the teacher to take photos of flowers today during the walk, too.  You can definitely see that represented in the photos uploaded to our Facebook page.  Here is a link to that album:

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.578165082243306.1073741870.213823248677493&type=1

We will have to see what kinds of flowers we may end up planting in our garden!  Working on the soil definitely comes first, so we are hoping to get some safe soil for the children to handle and possibly some compost.  Oceanside offers free compost if you are a resident!  If any of you are able to pick up some for us, we (and our plants) would greatly appreciate it!

Here are our activity plans and environment plans for the week.    We are excited for the possibilities and for our walk this week!

Environment Planning- August 27

Room 4 Planned Possibilities- August 27

The children are becoming more and more comfortable in Room 4.  We are using our large group gathering times to continue to learn one another’s names, do fun literacy activities, and to learn about the classroom routine.

Today the children practiced picking up their toys.  At group time, we played a song from the 1970’s called “Pick Up the Pieces.”  This is our auditory cue to clean up the classroom.  It makes picking up fun because we can dance while we clean up!  After group time, the children talked about what and where they cleaned.

We also added a new sign-in area outside of the classroom door.  Now, in the morning, please take a moment to have your child sign in the book when you arrive to school.  This is something new to add to the routine, but several children are familiar with signing in from last year.  We hope you enjoy the new sign-in spot outside our classroom door.  There’s a small documentation display there about the developmental stages of writing, too.  Everything from scribbling to writing one’s own name is considered within what we would expect in the preschool years.  If you have questions about it, please let a teacher know.

The afternoon is adding something to their routine, too: tooth brushing!  Today the children started to practice brushing teeth after lunch.  It was a lot of fun seeing them brushing their teeth in circles.  Thank you for bringing in toothbrushes if you are in extended care.

Thank you for reading our update!  We are excited to begin week 2 with all of you.

(NOTE: Photos of the environment to come in later posts- there are still some technology issues we are ironing out!)

Connecting with all of you has been wonderful this first week of school. It’s a huge part of the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education and is simply something we believe deeply in as a center as something that truly helps children learn and grow. Yesterday we wrote a blog post about connecting to the community and how that is also a part of the Reggio Emilia approach.

A great aspect of the college being our community is that there are so many wonderful and amazing places to visit! We have a theater, a library, an automotive shop, an art studio, a police station, a track, and many fountains and other departments along the way. We want to explore with them. This could lead to a lot of neat investigations into the campus community.

We are planning to do one field trip each week and to rotate the field trips so that it’s on a different day each week. We already have a schedule for our walks and the nice thing is that you can put it on your calendar now if you would like to walk with us on a walk. Having family members there not only helps keep children safer when walking around campus, but it also helps children see that their families value their school experience. Having a shared field-trip experience can sometimes be unforgettable to a young child.

All of the locations are not planned yet, but we will have a plan when the day comes. Volunteering to walk with us means arriving with your child before 8:45 when drop-off ends, staying for group time when we go over where we are going, and then walking with us from probably about 9:00 a.m. until about 10:00 a.m. (give or take a little bit of time in either direction).

Walk 1: Wednesday, August 28, Plant observations

Walk 2: Thursday, September 5, Plant observations

Walk 3: Monday, September 9

Walk 4: Tuesday, September 17

Walk 5: Friday, September 27, Library

Walk 6: Monday, September 30

Walk 7: Tuesday, October 8

Walk 8: Wednesday, October 16

Walk 9: Thursday, October 24

Walk 10: Friday, November 1

Walk 11: Tuesday, November 5

Walk 12: Wednesday, November 13

Walk 13: Thursday, November 21

Walk 14: Monday, November 25

Walk 15: Wednesday, December 5

Walk 16: Tuesday, December 10

A sign-up document will be available in Room 4. This will be an ongoing thing. We hope to never reschedule or cancel, but we might have to due to rain or something else that comes up. We will ask that you put a contact email on the list so that the teachers can let you know if anything changes.

These walks also help children get exercise and learn responsibility and safety when they venture out into the larger community!

This is going to be an exciting semester. We are glad you are all along for the journey.

-The Teachers of Room 4-

In Room 4 this semester, our goal will be to blog each day from Monday through Thursday.  On Fridays we have our planning meeting, so we won’t have time to write a whole blog post.

During the past two days, the children have been drawing plans for the garden box and talking more about what they are planning.  Due to some issues with technology, there are no photos of this activity to share on the blog yet.  However, imagine, if you will, that the children are drawing ideas on maps that are in the shape of our garden box.  It’s pretty exciting to see their plans!  We are writing the children’s names under the plans and their garden ideas.  We have seen even more ideas develop about the garden just in the past couple of days.

To take this investigation to the next step, we would like to schedule a walk next week.  We would like to walk onto campus on Wednesday, August 28, and observe the plants we see on campus.  We could walk to the Horticulture area and to other areas of campus.  The children could sketch the plants they see and we could take photos of plants.  It might help us refine our ideas of what we could plant.  We need volunteers for this walk from 8:45 until about 9:45 or 10:00 a.m.  We can only go if we have enough adults in our group to keep the group safe.  If you can walk with us, please email Laura at Lpaciorek@miracosta.edu or sign up in the classroom near the sign-in book.  We hope to walk on a Tuesday or Thursday in the next week or so, so please keep that in mind if your child attends one of those days.

Taking a walk onto campus helps children connect with the larger community.  One aspect of the Reggio Emilia philosophy, which we embrace at the Center, is a connection to the community.  Here at the CDC at MiraCosta, that means going on walking field trips.  We cannot leave campus, but that’s okay.  There is a lot we can learn just by walking on campus together.  Many of the children talk about it as the “big school” where their family members may even be attending class.  We have observed great excitement in the children when they get to explore the “big school” beyond our yard.

We know that families are eager to help with the gardening in our garden box.  We are still thinking deeply about what to plant, but we could start to work on the soil, for sure.  If you have any soil that is safe for children to handle and/or compost for us to use (Oceanside residents can get it for free – ask Laura how!), we will gladly take donations to help us get our garden box more ready for plants.  We may do container gardening at some point and we can always use extra soil and compost no matter what, even if we get more than we can immediately use.

Thank you for reading this update!  It has been a great week so far.  We can’t wait for tomorrow.  We will start up our blogging again next week.  We will also start up highlighting interest areas once we can upload photos here again.  Have a great Friday and weekend.