2013 TSGI Sprouts: We Love our Families!

This week we are learning all about our families! Thank you so much for sending in your photographs last week. I laminated them and posted them on Ryan and Bristol's "Family Board" in our classroom. We will use these all week as well as throughout the school year to talk about our families and to also give Ryan and Bristol "a piece" of home in our classroom.

Ryan and Bristol started their morning playing with shaving cream at our sensory table. We drew circles, squares, and triangles. We made eyes, noses, and smiles. We talked about how it is okay to be messy!

We then retreated to our own classroom where we continue to learn how to sit and attend to our morning circle time. Because there was such an incredible response to the use of instruments during Music Therapy last Thursday, I decided to incorporate some shakers into our morning circle in an effort to increase attention span and interaction. To start off our morning circle, we always get our hands ready with the song "Open and Shut Them."

Open and Shut Them
Open and shut them, open and shut them.
Give a little clap, clap, clap.
Open and shut them, open and shut them.
Fold them in your lap, lap, lap.
Creep them, crawl them. Creep them, crawl them.
Right up to your chin, chin, chin.
Open up your little mouth but.......
DO NOT LET THEM IN!

We sang our Good Morning Song to welcome all of our friends to school, and we use picture cues to help Ryan and Bristol say, "Here I am!" in response to our song, "Where is Bristol/Ryan?" We also targeted calendar and weather concepts through songs and picture cues.

On the playground today, Bristol and Ryan enjoyed taking turns passing the ball back and forth while using the sign (patting chest with hand) and saying, "My turn" or expanding our sentences to say, "I want the ball please." We got great eye contact and long interactions with this activity.

After getting some energy out on the playground, we headed back to our classroom for Language Circle, which is all about "Mom" today. We read one of my family's personal favorites, Llama Llama Misses Mama by Anna Dewdy. This book talks all about Llama llama's first day of preschool and the challenges of leaving his mama, learning a new schedule, and meeting new friends and teachers.

After we finished the book we used our family photographs to follow 1-and 2-step directions (i.e. "Find your mom. Find your dad and sister."), and we worked on verbally identifying our family members, either vocalizing a name approximation or by saying, "This is _______." Finally, we matched the written name of each family member to his or her picture in order to facilitate early word recognition. Our art project, involved using "Do-A-Dot" paint sets to decorate "Mom's" name. As we painted we vocalized, "Dot, dot, dot."and "We are painting." We were also able to target our colors. We made "hugs" for our moms with our arms wrapped around hearts. During our Language Circle, Ryan and Bristol enjoyed matching animal babies with their animal mommies using one of our Memory Games. We worked on saying, "Baby pig, where are you?" and "Here's the baby pig!" They specifically loved the mommy and baby skunk when we said, "Pee You! Stinky!"