September 25th 2012

"It’s me!"

Today we started the discussion of self-portraits.  I wanted the children to look at themselves closely and maybe even in a new light.  To start the process, I spoke to everyone at group time.  I brought with me a mirror, a marker, and paper.  I asked the children to look in the mirror and tell me what they saw.  “The kids!  It’s us!”  I then asked the children to start thinking about their faces.  What does a face have?  Our favorite thing to talk about was our mouths and eyes.  The subject of eye color has come up before, and it did again today.  Surprisingly most children knew what color eyes they had. 

From there I worked with one or two children at a time.  We repeated the process with them drawing this time.

The added element of the mirror really helped the children focus on the parts of the face.  One of our favorite things to do was watch how the parts of our faces moved.  This made drawing difficult sometimes, as there are many ways to draw a mouth (open, closed, smile, squished lips, flat lips, etc) but we managed.  I am hoping to use some of these products to discuss at a later time as a whole group.  

September 20th 2012

Welcome to Ms. Kurtjian’s classroom blog!  I’m going to take this opportunity to start off discussing what the children have shown interest in these past few days.  Like I have mentioned before, the teachers have been introducing a variety of materials to the children to see how they interact with them, what the children know, and what they would like to do more.  We spent the first week really focusing on scissors and writing utensils.  Those materials are always out for the children to use, so we should gain the knowledge of how to use them properly.

 

The guinea pigs have always been an area of interest with the children.  We have had multiple discussions about them.  Ellie and Penny are mother and daughter guinea pigs.  They get along very well, even though Ellie (mom) takes food from Penny sometimes- as we have noticed.  Sharing is something we all can be working on!  We are constantly having talks about how to behave around the guinea pigs and what is safe.  The children have noticed that in their free time, Penny and Ellie like to go “up the slide” and eat.  Hopefully we can get to know them more as the weeks pass.

As far as interests of the children, Ms. Gillespie has noticed how much the children enjoy working in the sand table.  It feels good on our hands, and there are many opportunities to work together as a group.  There are many avenues to head down involving the sand table and we will keep you posted as to how we are progressing!