preschool thinking

I rarely blog about my job teaching preschool because, well, I can't show you pictures of the kids, and stories just aren't the same without pictures!

HOWEVER, I can show you pictures of a project! I have a small group of 2- and 3-year-olds, and we have been working on making a fall tree this week! Here it is:

The thing I love about a developing curriculum is just that -- I didn't PLAN on making a tree this week; rather, it just sort of "came" to us! We started on Monday with a whole-group painting project -- we covered a sheet of butcher paper with shades of red, orange, yellow, and brown. The kids in my group are LITTLE, (2 1/2 to 3 1/2 years old,) and do have a hard time focusing on a teacher-directed task for more than ten minutes. BUT, the kids in my group love to paint, and they love to use scissors, so I thought for a while about what we could do with our painting -- and I thought they might like to cut it up and make a tree out of it!

Wednesday, I sketched a trunk and branches on another sheet of butcher paper, and we used brown crayons to color it in. (Vocabulary word alert! Not only have we been working on colors, the kids inadvertently learned the words bark, trunk, branch, tree, leaves, fall, and autumn! I'm so sneaky.) After we cut out the trunk and hung it on the wall, the kids insisted the tree needed leaves immediately! We worked on our tree for 45 minutes on Wednesday!!!! I couldn't BELIEVE it! While we were cutting and adding leaves to our tree, one of the kids mentioned our tree might like a squirrel to live in it. Someone else piped up, "what about the birds?" SO, we made birds and squirrels today.

Three of the kids in my group are starting to draw recognizeable objects; two are still very much in the scribbling stage. Here are some recognizeable birds and squirrels . . .

First, the birds:

The pink bird on the left is, in my opinion, very typical of how a preschooler would draw just about anything, when first learning to draw -- a blob for a body, and a few details, such as a face, wings, and legs, in this case. Most kids see the whole first, and the parts come later. The blue bird on the right, however, is sort of an anomoly -- the straight line across symbolizes wings, and the short line in back is a tail. This boy then added large eyes and eyebrows to his bird, but there is no actual body to speak of! Odd and interesting.

Here are the squirrrels . . .

Another typical "blob squirrel" -- body, legs, face, and tail.

This drawing actually has two parts -- the top area is a squirrel, and the bottom swirl is her second attempt at making a bushy/curly tail:


And here's one more squirrel, from the boy who only drew parts of his bird:

BIG eyes, four legs, and a tail. Again, no body!

Tomorrow, we'll go for a walk around the neighborhood and look at real trees, just to see if there's anything we "missed" in making our paper tree!

Hope you enjoyed your child development "lesson" for the day! Back to food this weekend, I promise!