The Secret Life of a Care Bear

This has got to be the best Carol Channing video there is:

Some nights I can’t get this song out of my head…

We do weekly (ish) units at my school. I’m not totally enamored with the idea, but my director really loves units. I prefer longer, broader themes, with maybe an activity or two a week, more tailored to what each classroom is into at the moment.

Fortunately, at the moment I can pretty much pick the theme for the week if I want to, since most of the kids who are doing any sort of real themed activity are in my classroom. When I have to pick themes, I prefer to pick things that are real and tangible to the kids. We did farms (at the director’s suggestion) because I have one kid who is obsessed with animals of all kinds and one kid who lives on a farm. We talked about snow and cold when it was snowing and cold. Lots of books have themes like “under the sea”, “outer space”, etc. I hate themes like that for preschool. Asking a three-year-old to whom reality is often a fluid sort of concept to imagine the planets in outer space or fish in an ocean they’ve never actually seen is sometimes a stretch.

Dinosaurs falls into the category of themes I’d rather pass up. They’ve all been dead for longer than any of us really have any concept of time for, but inexplicably show up in all sorts of shows and books. Talk about confusing! Many of them are so huge that it’s hard to even imagine.

But of course, dinosaurs are exactly what we’re in to right now.

During circle time, we were doing our favorite music activity of dancing how the music sounds. The kids get to decide what sort of dance that involves. Usually it’s animal-related, like “hop like a frog”, “fly like a butterfly”, and someone said, “stomp like a dinosaur”. Immediately I hear, “what’s a dinosaur?” The kid who brought it up tries to explain, but we’re confused because it sounds more like a monster. (I say “we” because I like to play dumb sometimes to make them explain what they’re thinking/saying!)

“No, it’s not like a monster, because they’re real!”

“They’re real? Have you ever seen one?”

“No, you can’t see them!”

“Are they invisible?”

So I finally give in and help explain how they were real, but all died. We’re intrigued now, so we look of photos of dinosaurs and dinosaur bones on my phone. (I love my iPhone for this! An iPad would be even better!) Looking at the pictures sparked some sort of dinosaur mania, where we had to discover exactly what they looked like and how you find them. (“Let’s go dig on the playground to find all the dinosaurs!”)

So yes, we’ve been studying dinosaurs as a unit this week. We dug for them in the sensory table while we looked at pictures of real digs. We learned that they are fossils and made our own mock fossils in playdough. One of our books mentioned that we don’t know exactly what they looked like on the outside, so we went to work coloring our own ideas of dinosaur skin.

It’s been great, but I feel bad for inflicting this unit on the other classrooms! Oops!

"I found three dinosaurs!"

More music, by popular demand.

I got tired of bad radio or lame kids music cds in my classroom all the time. No one needs to listen to nursery rhymes all day. Songs that we’re currently grooving to in my classroom:

Songs we’re sleeping to:

(If I had a computer in my classroom, I think I could just loop this video to get everyone down for nap time!)

I stumbled onto this teaching blog Friday after one of my very excellent ECE teachers from Parkland shared a post on Facebook. I spent most of the morning reading through various posts (yes, I was home sick AGAIN—subject for another post!).

So after pondering the difference between what he’s doing and what’s going on in my classrooms, I’m feeling better about the whole experience. I don’t feel like there’s much meaningful play or learning going on in my room right now and it’s been bothering me. I don’t know why I didn’t realize this before, but it hit me like a ton of bricks today.

DUH. I have barely any kids in my classroom right now. One of them can barely talk, and another is in the two or three word sentences phase. My poor preschoolers just don’t have very many peers to interact with! I’m used to a teaching approach that’s very emergent and based on what the kids are doing, but there are barely any kids!

Now that I’ve had this realization, I think I can make it through the next couple of months while I gain kids in my room without feeling like the world’s lousiest teacher. We are doing lots of discovery stuff anyway, but it’s definitely the lack of child-to-child interaction that I’ve been feeling in there!

Needless to say, I can’t wait until my new preschoolers start!

More songs I love right now:

Mark & I snapped up this album from Amazon MP3 right after we saw them on the Grammys this past week and I am loving it. I don’t think I’d ever heard of them before, but I was like, “WHO IS THAT BAND WITH THE GUY WHO LOOKS LIKE JOHNNY DEPP?!”. Admit it, he totally does.

If I so much as think of a few words of this song, I’ll be singing it for the rest of the day and I don’t even care. HOW’S THAT BRICKLAYIN’ COMIN’, HOW’S YOUR ENGINE RUNNIN’…

I have the album and I love it, especially Sounds Like Hallelujah.

Also, if you’re still not on the Adele bandwagon you really should be. That girl can saaaaang. Dang. I was quite pleased to see her walk away with half the Grammys, even though it means she stomped all over Mumford & Sons, who are also excellent. Sad for them that they were up against Adele!

I can’t stop listening to this song.

On Wednesday we discovered that all our favorite books right now are rhyming books. After talking about what rhyming meant and reading through to find rhymes, it was decided that we should write our own poem. So over snack, we brainstormed to come up with some rhymes. I think it was harder than Macy expected to think of rhyming words, so our poem doesn’t quite have a cohesive theme! I provided a little guidance here and there when she got stuck. I wrote out a final version for her (shown above) and left room for her to illustrate and write in her name, but I didn’t get to see the finished version because we ran out of time before nap and I had to go home.

I think we just found our first project!