Sewing Table-A Collaborative Fine Motor Experience

Sewing is a great activity to do with young children to develop their fine motor abilities.  I have a low table in the classroom with about a three inch lip all around it.  I stapled and then duct taped a large piece of burlap to cover the entire table leaving a large community sewing surface.  I then threaded and tied a needle full of colorful yarn to each corner.  

Documenting And Reporting The Power Of Play

As an advocate or the belief that children learn best through play what are you checking for in terms of progress? As a preschool manager who holds the same beliefs I would love some advice from you on progress reports for parents who see writing and number recognition as their top priorities for school readiness.  Your views would be greatly appreciated.  

I received this great question the other day on my facebook page, Playfully Learning, and wanted to share my answer as many of you may be faced with similar challenges.  

I teach in a private nursery school in Connecticut.  We do follow the state guidelines for our objectives, The Connecticut Framework.  This has thirty objectives across several domains: Personal & Social, Physical, Cognitive and Creative.  My staff is responsible for creating environments and activities that will foster development in children across these areas as well as assessing their progress on each of the objectives. 

Oh, Lovely Snow! A Literacy Activity

We recently read one of my favorite books to read with young children, Mrs. Wishy Washy.  This is a predictable book with a repetitive pattern and lively funny illustrations that lends itself very well to children rereading it independently.  It is about some animals who decide to frolic in the mud much to the chagrin of their keeper, Mrs. Wishy-Washy.  It is a terrific book to act out.  One of the activities we did with this story is to create our own version of it.  

Celebrating The Process Of Our Learning

We built our gong stand, we finished our documentation panels and we sent our invitations out.  It was time to share all of our discoveries about musical instruments that we had made during our ten week study. 

The Final Project: Building the Gong

The day finally came for us to build our gong.  We had had to postpone it twice already due to various issues.  It was a cold and cloudy day, but NOT raining or snowing!!  This was important as this stand is really big and had to be built outside.

Documentation Panel Titles

I received an email this week concerning documentation panels.

 I am trying to do a documentation panel with my preschoolers. The project is boxes. When I write my title does the title need to ask a question? For example, “What should we make with all the boxes we have collected? Please let me know.

This is a great question!

I title them by describing what the display is showing.

For example, several that are hanging in my classroom in preparation for our big share this week are:

Our Trip to Norwalk High School Wind Symphony

Designing Our Gong Stand

Building the Gong Stand

Musicians Visit CCNS

These consist of photos that the children have helped select that best document our discoveries with each different exploration, as well as sketches or other materials that help tell the story of the learning.  The children dictate to me what is happening in the photos.

 

As tough as it is to find space in the classroom, I hand these low enough so that the children can actively engage in looking at them, talking to each other about them and sharing them with their parents when they come for the share next week. 

It is an interesting process as we always take many more pictures than we need and we really have to talk through which ones best tell the story of our learning rather than just the ones the kids are in!

I do not display every piece that every child has made for the share.  I have several pieces of memory drawings, several of field trip sketches, gong designs, etc.  The rest are in individual folders that the children will pull out and share with their guests at the event on Wednesday. 

I would love to see photos and hear about any documentation panels that you and your class have created with projects in which you are involved.  Please share!

Another suggestion I have for sharing work with others is to make a question guide to help adults prompt the children to share what they have learned in case they get nervous or need some reminding.  I usually just print up a sheet and hand it out as the parents enter the classroom.

Mine will be something like:

Why did you decide to build a gong stand?

How did you build it?

What instruments have been able to touch?

Make sure to have your child play his instrument for you.

Ask him/her how he/she made it.

and more.  

It is similar to a  museum guide to help parents engage their child who other wise might not talk.  

Our Final Project: Designing the Gong Stand

During our study of musical instruments we followed the lead of the children seeking answers to their questions and wonderings about instruments.  In order to do this we went on several field trips and had musicians come to our school as the primary interest of the class was to touch and see how various instruments worked.  On one of our trips we saw a large gong and the children became enthralled with it.  When writing our thank you notes and other drawings, the gong was the featured illustration from the children.  This brought us to the idea for our big project.

A few years ago one of our teachers was presented with a gong to celebrate her ten years of service at our school.  She is especially musical so this was a lovely tribute to her.  She has since moved on from the school, but she left the gong to be used by the school.  The only problem was the gong needed a stand.  After several years the stand was not purchased or built as other priorities took precedent and the gong sat in our shed.  This was the perfect time to bring it out! 

We showed the gong to the class and they were thrilled.  But, we had a problem.  It could not be played without a stand.  So we decided we were going to build one….thus the research of our big project began. 

We developed the photos of the gong we had seen.  This stand was made of metal in the shape of a hexagon.  This was going to be too difficult for us to make.  We had to come up with alternative plans.  I didn’t have access to metal workers, but I thought I could get someone to help us build it out of wood.  So while I tried to figure that piece out by contacting parents….the class got started trying to come up with the design.

We worked on this by putting materials in our block center: yarn, string, hole punchers, pie tins, tape and all of our wooden blocks.  The children attempted to build various gong stands that they thought would work.  As they worked we talked about the shape and structure of their buildings and how they could transfer to a real stand.  For example, curved wood-although beautiful- is more difficult to accomplish than a straight design. 

We also consulted the internet and looked at several designs built by others.  This inspired a new round of building and sketching our designs.    I was also able to share that we could purchase several large pieces of straight wood after an investigation at Home Depot.  (This would have been another wonderful field trip, but we had just been on two and I didn’t want to ask too much of our already generous parent drivers.)

While some children worked on designing the stand, others chose to measure the gong and try and figure out how long the pieces of wood would need to be so we would know how much to buy. 

As we were building the children noticed that their stands kept falling and we worked on various ways to support them.  We then remembered that we have a hanging tire swing on our playground and we went and looked at that.  Photographing it and looking at it again more closely we noticed the A frame built on the bottoms of the sides. 

  We decided to incorporate this in to our design as our gong was do heavy and we wanted it to have a lot of support.  At the end of these work sessions, we shared our discoveries and ideas and came to a consensus on a design with which we were all happy.

  

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find a parent who could come in during our class time to help us with the build.  Luckily, I have a very handy husband who is great with children and was willing to take a little time off to help us ….but that is the next post.