EMerce*d in Learning

Mindful Monday This is where each Monday we are mindful of our pedagogy, slowly adjusting our lessons to match our theories. There are some things that are universal among early childhood classrooms.  One of those elements is circle time.  While there is no real hard and fast rules for conducting circle time, there are several guidelines that could be helpful.   1. The first thing to think about is how long should your circle time be.  If you are teaching infants or toddlers your circle time will look quite different from a preschool or kindergarten circle time.  For the youngest children you want to let them come and go as they want.  You may only be reading a book or singing a song for your circle time at this age.  If they lose interest that is ok!  As they age you can add a little time to your circle time.  Three's should be able to make it through a book, a song, and a game. Remember to include LOTS of movement, inclu...

Mindful Monday This is where each Monday we are mindful of our pedagogy, slowly adjusting our lessons to match our theories. Group work.  Man that statement can elicit many different responses based on what you endured in school. As the uber control freak I hated group projects.  The other people couldn't possibly do the work "right" so I would do it all.  Or most of it and let them edit.  I had to let them do something right? I've also been part of groups where the others simply refused to do any work (obviously this was after I realized teachers didn't want my work, they wanted our work). I like trying to get my students on the group work bandwagon early.  I think it helps the ones who lean more towards control to learn to trust their peers.  It also helps those that tend toward allowing others to do all the work to learn to participate.  My favorite thing about group work for super young children is building their communic...

Mindful Monday This is where each Monday we are mindful of our pedagogy, slowly adjusting our lessons to match our theories. Hopefully by now you have noticed that I like to incorporate many various learning modalities and content areas into each lesson.  I wanted to share a few lesson ideas on nursery rhymes today.  Nursery rhymes are rich in vocabulary and their rhyming words are an excellent way to prepare children for reading. I had the children create art using a pumpkin cut out to relate back to the rhyme "Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater."  Some of the details they added were amazing.  Even the mutli-hued pumpkin I added near the poem was created by cutting out paper painted by the children.  Various shades of orange paint had been left out for the children to use and when they were finished I simply cut out a pumpkin shape.       During story time we read many different rhymes.  We retold the story using a story board....

Mindful Monday This is where each Monday we are mindful of our pedagogy, slowly adjusting our lessons to match our theories. After reading about how important grow motor activities are in this post Big Body Play, I thought it would be fun for us to share some ideas on gross motor activities being worked into everyday lessons.  While planning I try to think about my lessons in terms of the whole unit.  I want to ensure that the overall unit incorporates many different features, one of the most important for me being gross motor.  While planning a unit of the wild west I wanted to come up with something that the kids could revisit while playing on the playground if they wanted. After eliminating horse riding and snake wrangling I decided on steer roping. I had to think about who would clean the playground after the steer had visited so I opted for the chair variety of steer! The children tried to lasso the "runaway steer".  Luckily the steer (a chair) ...

Mindful Monday This is where each Monday we are mindful of our pedagogy, slowly adjusting our lessons to match our theories.  We use each spring to teach children about plants.  I bet I could enter any school from infants to fifth grade and see something about plants in a lesson during the spring.  It is almost as predictable as saying "look, they've fallen asleep" and waking half the class. While I'm not crazy creative when it comes to plants, I'd like to share a few things that we've done over the years.  I like to start with talking about different kinds of plants.  We read several books about plants and even make and label a diagram to keep at the children's eye level for their reference. This particular diagram is of the beanstalk from Jack and the Beanstalk.  My children were really into the story that particular year. Then we take a trip to buy plants from the local hardware store each year.  When your kids are cute you sometimes...

Mindful Monday This is where each Monday we are mindful of our pedagogy, slowly adjusting our lessons to match our theories. I just love working on sight words with my Kindergarteners!   In my classroom we lump sight words and high frequency words together.   We (being the Kindergarten teaching team I work with) feel like it is easier to tackle them at the same time and in the same ways.   I absolutely stink at remembering to take pictures so I'm sorry that many of my ideas don't have pictures to accompany them.   Here goes: Using Scrabble letter tiles to add how much their word is worth (I usually add this when the children are in the portion of the year where we are tackling addition in math).   How much is your word worth?   This activity was a gem I found on TpT How Much is Your Word Worth? Sight word writing on the windows.   This one was one of my kids favorites this year! Rainbow writing sight words. Stamping sigh...

Mindful Monday This is where each Monday we are mindful of our pedagogy, slowly adjusting our lessons to match our theories.   Is matter in your curriculum?   We get to touch on it in my Kindergarten program.   I always seem to have a few kids who have difficulty understanding the concept of molecules making up the things around them.   While introducing how the molecules behave in each state we used our bodies to illustrate.   Here are the kids pretending to be a solid:   I had the kids all fit into a hula hoop and try to move around.   We looked at how being so close together helped us to move together and keep a distinct shape.   We still moved in small increments as individuals, but the shape remained. Here they are as a liquid:   We used a jumpy rope that had been tied together to create a shape.   Our molecules moved and our shape changed form.   It was hard to retain a circle, square, or any ot...