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!

on work.

First, here's last night's dinner:

A nice, big bowl of beans and rice was in order, after a seemingly long work week! Dan and I have been eating huge quantities of black beans lately -- I feel like I just cooked up a huge batch, but I took the last two jars out of the freezer last night! Must buy more. :)

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I really don't blog much about my "other life" (i.e., as a preschool teacher,) for a number of reasons -- this is a food blog (mostly,) I want to keep some confidentiality in my life, I can't (and won't) plaster pictures of other people's children on the internet, etc. BUT, I can tell you about something exciting we've been up to lately!

A few weeks ago, I noticed some rogue milkweed growing up through the woodchips on our playground. I kept a close eye on it, not really drawing much attention to it, until I noticed a TON of these:

Monarch eggs! I freaked out! (Literally, when I noticed them, I shouted, "Jackie! We've got eggs!") The kids all ran over and were totally and completely excited that we might have baby caterpillars, and eventually pupae and butterflies! We got busy:

Here's our awesome sign:

I quote from the kids, "Don't touch the eggs, please! Caterpillars are growing."

We've been protecting our milkweed like mother bears:

The sticks and yarn have since blown down in a thunderstorm, but the kids are busy devising some other plan for protecting their eggs.

Why all the hard work? 'Cause now . . .

Yessssss . . . we've found about a half-dozen caterpillars! I'm convinced there are more, since so many of the eggs have clearly hatched, but I think they have been hiding down in the woodchips, and coming up just to eat. We shall see . . . I'm hoping they will get bigger and bigger, and eventually become butterflies!

I spent some time browsing Google images when we first found the eggs, so we have a set of picture cards in our classroom, describing the whole life-cycle. The kids have learned the word "metamorphosis," and say it like they are silly TV announcers or something. We have been reading poems and stories about caterpillars and butterflies, the kids have been wearing shirts to school with butterflies on them on purpose, I took tons of pictures of different butterflies on my hiking and camping adventures these past couple of weeks, and I want to get ahold of a couple of body pillow cases, so the kids can pretend to be pupae. We're butterfly crazy! Woo!

so . . . much . . . candy . . .

I apologize, but I'm not going to FLOG today. I completely lost track of how much candy I ate at training today, and I have pictures of nothing. (I did manage some healthy choices as well, like three pieces of fruit, a giant salad, lots and lots of water, a healthy dinner, but definitely way too much candy.)

I hate eating when I'm bored. Guilty as charged.

EXERCISE:
After sitting on my butt in a conference room all day, (snore,) I did 25 minutes of yoga when I got home. I aim to do more tomorrow, because it made me feel GREAT!

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I'm about to complain, which I realize I rarely do on this blog. I must state one of my hugest pet peeves in the whole wide world:

I HATE IT WHEN PEOPLE SAY THE SAME THING OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND REPEAT EACH OTHER DURING MEETINGS.

Good god, I have better things to do with my time than sit around and listen to you all talk about how smart you all think each other are. RAWR!

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Ok, complaining over. Back to regularly-scheduled FLOG action tomorrow!