We miss Tucker! His three friends at school kept asking about him, thinking he was going to walk through the door at any moment. Hope his mom had 'fun' running the marathon in D.C. this past weekend. We are looking forward to seeing Tucker tomorrow and hearing about his trip to D.C.
I was able to work on curriculum based assessment today with one child at a time as Ms. Carol worked with the other two children. The kids worked on pumpkin patterns, a maze, writing their name, matching upper and lower case letters, and lacing yarn through a big paper tooth. I noticed that there were times the kids were working more independently than I have seen up to this point!
The mystery box was a great way to introduce our weekly theme of dentists which is part of our monthly theme of community helpers. I described what was in the box using our chart: they can be many different colors, they are skinny, part of it feels hard and part of it feels rough, you can find it in a bathroom, you brush with it, and we all should use it. After the kids guessed that it was a toothbrush, they each got one and we sang the 'hello song'. Each child asked the person next to him what he had, where do you find it and what do you use it for. We quickly put the toothbrushes into plastic bags with the plan to practice brushing our teeth tomorrow.
We introduced 'community helpers' by brainstorming all of the different kinds of jobs we could think of together. Using an idea web, we put pictures of 10 different jobs around the words 'community helpers'. After the chart was all done, we asked each other 'who' and 'what' questions about each helper.
Since this week we are focusing on the dentist, we started our science experiment about teeth. Our science questions were "Which liquid will make our teeth strong? Which liquid can hurt our teeth." Using hard boiled eggs and pretending that each one was a tooth, the kids put the four eggs into cups of either milk, water, juice, or Coke. They each made a hypothesis by circling one of two pictures for each of the different kinds of liquids. I mentioned that we would be able to see the results on Wednesday, and someone asked, "What are results?". I love that the kids are asking questions about the new words they are hearing. The activity prompted another child to tell us about the eggs, milk and juice they have at home. It's great when the kids are making connections with their life outside of the immediate activity!
We finally finished our paper bag jack-o-lanterns! Evan started to tell us about his jack-o-lantern, giving it a name. Well, we didn't want to miss that opportunity. So, quickly pulling out paper and marker, the kids dictated answers to 'who, what, where, when' questions about their jack-o-lantern. I will turn these into books and the kids can read them to the preschoolers, with their jack-o-lantern sitting right there beside them. I love my job:)
