We're Back!
Welcome!
It’s been a long few months! Thank you all for sticking with us through these hard times and for continuing to make safe choices for your family as we work toward finding some semblance of normalcy in our small program. As families are gradually returning, the main focus here has been around re-integrating the children and returning to their respective levels of comfort and social development at preschool. We’ve been having lots and lots of fun together, and, quite frankly, the children have been pleasantly surprising me with their bravery in the face of yet another major change in their daily schedules!
Picking up where we left off
We hear it all the time, right? “Children are resilient.” It’s been tricky to predict how the children would cope with returning after being away for so long, or how they would adjust to the change of more children joining us after having such a small group at preschool. This particular circumstance is one we’ve never seen before. Just as the children began to feel most comfortable and secure in their routines, everything changed. The world is a crazy place, and our children are showing us just how well they can handle it. They’ve truly missed one another and are so excited to play together again. We’ve seen minimally challenging adjustment periods, and I am just so glad for them all. Here are a few examples of how much fun they’ve been having now that they get to play together again.
Click on each photo to read about it! (If you’re using a mobile device, tap the small dot in the bottom corner of each photo to display its caption.)
BUilding the tire tower
Just after their arrivals one recent morning, Lukas, Ronin, and Adelynn chose to jump right into some advanced collaborative work. Together, they set a goal of stacking all four tires to make the tallest tire tower possible. After stacking three, they quickly realized how challenging it would be to add the fourth to the top, but they wouldn’t give up. They asked the adults around them for a help a few times, but we chose to take this moment to lower the height of our instructional scaffolds and put their skills to the test! Without any physical help from adults and only verbal encouragement, these three kids were able to be successful in reaching their tire-stacking goal and, in the process, showed off their growing communication skills, physical strength, abilities to collaborate, critical thinking skills, understanding of physics and engineering, and their unwavering determination and resilience. In the end, their work paid off tremendously and they added another dash of pride and accomplishment to their developing self concepts. Luckily, this magical moment is saved on video for you to watch! Enjoy!
An interest in Mud
Providing sensory experiences for young children has been a challenge among us preschool teachers in the era of COVID. It’s challenging to find a balance between keeping everything clean and sanitized, and providing children with the developmental experiences we know they crave. Play dough, for instance, is a very hands-on activity, and is stored in a plastic bag for freshness between each use. It’s tricky to sanitize something like play dough (and developmentally inappropriate to prevent the children from working together), so it’s unfortunately an experience that is packed away in preschool programs right now, in hopes that we can reintroduce it when it’s safer to do so. The children have shown us, however, that they don’t miss it much…because nothing is going to stop them from finding the squishy, squashy, doughy experiences that help them learn about their world. No play dough? No worries! We’ll just make mud.
After some experimenting, the children perfected their mud-making method of delivering water from the Mud Kitchen sink to the Dig Pit. We made the Dig Pit into “an ocean” and “a river,” and then proceeded to play, play, play! There was digging, there were animals and cars, there was sitting, laying and rolling, there was splashing and throwing…and the muddy experiments continued day after day with no end in sight.
These valuable sensory experiences soon developed into some muddy pretend play with our Mud Kitchen dishes, and conversations began to center around “soups” and “mud pies.” One such example:
Ronin: “I’m making soup for the bugs! They’re gonna eat it! I maked it with a pan. That’s on the stove.”
Adelynn: “Bugs like to eat, eat!”
This type of play triggered the use of vocabulary like, “ingredients,” “cooking,” and “recipe.” At Together Time one morning, we discussed recipes, and that they have two parts: ingredients and instructions, then we posed the question: is there a recipe for mud? We got to talking, and together, we wrote:
Mud Recipe
Ingredients
1. Water
2. Soil
Instructions
- Scoop dirt and you pour it into another place that’s not mud.
- “Shovel, dump. Shovel, dump".” (Lukas)
- Put grass on top so that it grows
After writing our own recipe, we thought we’d try out following one. We found a “mud pie” recipe and got to work. We sourced the ingredients and used this opportunity to practice counting, taking turns, pouring/stirring/scooping motions, cutting with scissors, and, of course, the ever-so-valuable collaboration skills.
…and the Mud Kitchen work continued! We added a ton more dishes to our Mud Kitchen area and the collaboration and fantasy play has continued to grow! The children have been creating food and drinks (lots of coffee lately!) and serving them to one another. It’s been such a joy watching the children work together and grow their creativity and imaginative skills, all while getting messy in the mud!
Since we’ve been doing such a wonderful job understanding recipes, we decided to follow a real one. Last Thursday, we donned our aprons (…and for some reason, our safety goggles…) and read through each step of the recipe for banana oat cookies. We worked together to mash the bananas, measure the oats, stir, scoop, and bake. When we finished, it was so exciting to taste what we made as our lunch time dessert!
Welcome, Dominic!
Last but not least, I want to give a big warm welcome to our newest friend, Dominic! Dominic is joining us this week and has already shown us how much fun he’s going to bring to our program. I’m sure that Dominic’s love for water play is going to be the most perfect addition to our mud pie experiments! Dominic will be here every day, so if you see him or his parents, Lauren and Cooper around drop-off or pick-up times, be sure to say hello and welcome them to our Olive Branch family! Welcome, Eisenmann family, we’re so glad you’re joining us!