What a crazy week we have had! I felt like this week flew by as we were constantly hopping from one thing to the next. We had several activities this week that were outside of our normal routine so it was hard for us to sit down and refocus on a new exploration. I decided to take this time and focus on something we all experience...emotions. As you know from living with a 4 year old, they experience a lot of emotions in a day (as we all do). The beauty of a young child's emotions is that they hide nothing. As we experience different emotions in the classroom, we've been trying to talk through them. We've been trying to get each child to think about what caused their emotion, what support they need while they're feeling this way, and the appropriate way to deal with that emotion.
To start this week, we made a huge list of emotions. It was surprisingly long! Many of these emotions they listed were ones that I didn't expect them to have heard before. As we listed these emotions, we talked about them. We discussed situations that cause these different emotions and how we want to react when experiencing them. I also categorized these emotions into two groups: emotions that make us feel good and emotions that make us feel not so good. Throughout our conversation we learned that each of us has felt all these emotions at some point in our life and none of these emotions are "bad". They may not feel good at times but it's not bad for us to feel angry or grumpy...it's just part of how we deal with different situations. After a long (and surprisely in depth) conversation, we read a book about emotions. Their favorite book about emotions this week was "Today I Feel Silly: and other emotions that make my day" by Jamie Lee Curtis. Here is the list the kids came up with: sad, silly, crazy, happy, angry, frustrated, mad, sleepy, scared, quiet, excited, grumpy, joyful, confused, lonely, cranky.
In discussing how different emotions make us feel, we encouraged the kids to express these emotions through artwork. To get them started we talked about what different emotions look like by using colors. When I called out an emotion each child gave a color that they associated with that emotion. While some of the color results were different, the majority of them were the same...for example, most associated red with anger and blue with sad. From colors we moved to drawings. We spent journal time spread out around the room (we love to color on the floor) with our crayons drawing a picture of an emotion. The kids could pick any emotion they wanted and express it in any form they chose. We explained that these journal entries could reflect any emotion they've felt before in any way they felt best expressed that emotion. We turned some low volume classical music on and let them go to work. I was amazed. They put genuine time and effort behind their artwork. After everyone was done, we met back together to have a share time. We've seen them thinking about their emotions through their paintings as well. You'll notice several paintings around the room labeled with a simple emotion instead of sentences.
Speaking of artwork, we were able to work with a wonderful artist this week to make paintings for our annual Posh Nosh auction. The kids worked with him to make a class painting as well as contributing to a painting that was done by each student in the school. They didn't want this activitiy to end. I'm pretty sure they all felt like super kids using a fancy brush and painting on a huge piece of canvas with an artist. We're so proud of our class full of artist! Of course the painting it going to amazing...I can't wait to see it in January! As a reminder, our conferences will start on Monday. Feel free to sign up outside our classroom if you'd like to meet with us. I hope everyone enjoys their weekend!
Love,
Ms. Rachael
Approaches to Learning:
- Represent prior events and personal experiences in one or more ways.
- Demonstrate an increasing ability to follow through with tasks and activities.
- Understand a task can be accomplished through several steps.
- Show ability to focus attention for increasing variety of chosen tasks and activities for short periods of time (10-20 minutes).
- Show creativity and imagination using materials in representational play.
Social & Emotional:
- Display emerging social skills of trying to take turns and talk with others during play.
- Show awareness and respond to feelings of others with adult guidance and support.
- Stand up for rights much of the time.
- Describe characteristics of self and others.
- Interact easily with familiar adults by engaging in conversations, responding to questions and following direction.
Language & Literacy:
- Make relevant comments or appropriate responses to story events or characters.
- Respond to elements of colorful language in stories and poetry.
- Begin to identify significant words from text read aloud.
- Begin to distinguish between real and make-believe in stories read aloud.
- Relate information from texts to personal experience.
- Make connections to prior knowledge, other texts, and the world in response to texts read aloud.
Mathematics:
- Use emergent mathematical knowledge as a problem-solving tool.
- Generate conjectures based on personal experiences and simple reasoning.
- Investigate solutions to simple problems.
- Use appropriate vocabulary to communicate mathematical ideas.
- Integrate mathematical ideas into personal representations.
- Begin to show an awareness of numbers in their environment.
- Represent simple joining and separating situations through 4.
- Compare sets of no more than ten objects using the terms "more than" or "same as".
We are artists...
We are writers...
We are mathematicians...
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