Engaged Early Learning

Gross motor play is an important part of our school day.  Gross motor play happens right before our circle time in our classroom because moving the body gets the brain primed to learn.  We do a variety of activities for gross motor play ranging from free play, where children can run and play however they wish, to more structured games and focused standards like skipping and hopping.  We use hula hoops to sort items such as these items in our Community Helpers theme.  Tape large letters or numerals on the floor and allow children to drive around it with a car.  Give each student two paper plates and turn on music. Students must stay on plates and move around the room as if they are ice skating.  Practice pushing and pulling heavy boxes.  Crawl under and over chairs.  Blow up balloons and release them in a large room. Have students collect the balloons and return them to a designated area.  Play with bubbles and sidewalk...

Literacy is so important in any classroom but let's really focus on literacy in the early education classroom to help children start on a solid foundation and develop a love of reading! I recently attended a training on emergent literacy which I found to be so helpful. Research shows that the two best predictors of reading success are phonemic awareness and letter knowledge. Preschool children should develop phonological awareness, print awareness and have oral language and vocabulary.  In early literacy children will pretend to write, pretend to read, name letters, "read" print in their environment, write their name and ask questions about print. As teachers we should choose print-rich books to share with or students and then have explicit discussions about that print. When looking for print-rich books, look for big bold letters and unique features. Every book we read to our students should have a purpose. I took all of the books that I have in my classroom for read alou...

Although we do a lot of fine motor practice in our classroom, the biggest writing project of the year is getting each student to write their first name before heading to kindergarten. For the beginning half of the year, the students find their name card as they enter the classroom. For the remaining half of the year, they write their name on an attendace form when they arrive. Througout the year, we have name practice atleast once a week. There are many different activities we do to practice our names.  I place each child's name in a clear sleeve so we can work with it multiple times without remaking the sheets. We trace our names with dry erase markers.  We cover our names with mini erasers, buttons, pom poms or other small items.  We build our names with letter tiles and rainbow write where we write our names three times on top of each other with three different colors.  We look at our names and copy them underneath or trace on the highlighted nam...

We have snack time every day and each child brings their own snack and obviously eats their snack at their own pace. The time right after snack, when some children are still eating but others have finished, used to be tricky. It was hard to keep the chaos at bay. Now, I create Quiet Boxes. Each child has a Quiet Box under their cubby and each week I shift the Quiet Boxes so that each child gets the opportunity to try every Quiet Box before the end of the year. So, when a students finishes their snack and cleaning up, they walk over and pull out the Quiet Box that is under their cubby and play with the contents until every child is finished with their snack. I have a couple of guidelines with Quiet Boxes that I have found helpful maintaining order. Students are required to only play with their own Quiet Box, not a friend's. Also, students must play quietly. If they are not interested in their Quiet Box, they are allowed to draw in their journal or look at a book instead, again as lo...

It is hard to fit everything in to a two and a half hour school day so I use centers to help cover material during play. I schedule centers into our school day three times a week. There are a variety of centers that I rotate through and many, many activities that each center can entail. Here's the list of centers that I use but there are others that could work better in other classrooms. *Art Center (includes crafting, drawing, painting, coloring, stamping) *Block Center (includes building with different types of blocks) *Dramatic Play Center (includes home living, dress-up, vet's office, floral shop, bakery) *Fine Motor Center/Sensory Center (includes water play, rice or sand play, playdough, tracing, beading, cutting, name practice) *Literacy Center (includes letter matching, letter tracing, literacy games, sound matching, rhyming) *Math Center (includes number practice, counting, math games) *Reading Center (includes reading, looking at and enjoying books) *Sci...