Paint Cups

I wish I would of thought of this a long time ago. I have always had paint ready to go in the paint cups so that if children wanted to paint I was ready, but once the paint had sat in them for awhile it is really hard to wash out. I would have to soak the cups over night. This year we received new paint cups and lid which we needed since ours were about 10 years old or older. Any ways we wanted to keep them looking nice so we started placing small sandwhich bags inside the cups before filling them with paint. When we change the paint we just simple remove the bag and throw them away.

Closing Kids World Exploration

Over the next couple of months I’m going to be moving my information from my web page Kids World Exploration to this blog. It has become to costly to keep the web page up and running but hate to lose all the information on the web site so I’m going to be transferring that information to this blog. I enjoy the blog community and would rather put all my time and effort into this community of professionals. Also if you read my All in the life of family you know that I am on a get out of debt mission and this will help me in make that goal. Sorry if some of the information will be repeat for you. I will still continue to add new information during the transition.


Thanks,

All About Me

The new year has gotten off to a great start. We started the school year off by learning everything we could about one another. The first thing we did was to trace all the children’s bodies onto butcher paper and rolled them up and sent them home for the family to create a life size poster all about their child.

When they started coming back we where amazed at how the families took time with their children to create a life like representation of their child. Each child had a turn to explain how they created their life size picture of themselves and why they chose certain things that represented themselves. Here are a few of the posters.

One of our fist small group projects was for each child to draw a self portrait. We found at the local dollar tree small table top mirrors. Each child looked into the mirror and drew a picture.

We had a discussion about different feeling. After the discussion we had the children tell us how they were feeling and we graphed what they said.

Daily Questions

Developing Oral Language Conversation Skills

To build young children oral language skills it requires having meaningful conversations with them through out the day. Build children’s oral language skills by having a daily question as part of your preschool curriculum will insure that you are having at least one meaningful conversation with every child in your classroom.

When having verbal interaction with children it will not only help them to communicate and be more sociable, but it is also crucial to their development of speaking, listening and writing we need to cultivate their oral language skills every day.

When having these conversations with children they will learn how conversations work, how to take turns, look attentively, use facial expressions and express new ideas in different ways.

What does your Daily Question look like?

I have a pocket chart that is centrally located in the classroom. At the top of the pocket chart is the question of the day. It is a question that has more than one right answer or that can be answered in many different ways. Each child in the classroom has a name card so that the staff knows who has been asked the daily question. This insures us that we have had at least one meaningful conversation with every child that was at school that day.

How are you able to get in a daily question for each child?

I have a group size of 24 children. There are three staff members at all times. At the beginning of the day we split the name cards evenly amongst us. This means that that the most we should have is 8 children each.

How does the conversation go?

• What is your favorite dinner?
• How do you think this dinner is made?
• When you have your favorite dinner how does it make you feel?

Things you should remember when you’re having a meaningful conversation with children.

• Get down to the child’s eye level.
• Avoid dominating the conversation.
• Find opportunities to use new or more sophisticated words as you talk with children.
• Make sure the conversation is able to go back and forth at least three times to each person having the conversation.

Remember that there is no such thing as talking too much with children. So talk, talk and talk some more.

Lets Talk About Communication by Deborah