This week, we’ve been playing boisterously in the loft, in the snow, and with building materials around the room. We particularly enjoyed finding “ice crystals” in the sinks in the yard, practicing cutting with scissors and paper at the art table, and sending letters to each other at the classroom’s message center.
We’ve been working on concepts around literacy and body awareness that share something in common: straight and curvy lines. We’ve been using Handwriting Without Tears’ “Mat Man” curriculum to create the human body out of straight and curvy lines, and then using those lines to create upper and lower-case letters during small group work. We’ve been working on self-portraits, noticing the straight and curvy lines in our own faces and translating what we see in the mirror to a representation on paper.
We have continued to explore how we’re feeling by naming feelings such as “calm,” “sad,” “happy,” “angry” and “love.” Each morning, children move their pictures to one of the “feelings collages” we made in small groups, in order to share with the class how they’re feeling that day. If a child’s feelings change over the course of the day, we encourage them to change their picture to match how they are feeling - which can serve as a way to help name, sit with and resolve the feeling.
We are wishing everyone a cozy, snowy weekend!
