Obviously Halloween is coming up. For school we'll have a little 'parade' of costumes through the elementary classroom who will then perform some poems for us. Then we'll get a special snack (pumpkin seeds) and that's it. Pretty simple as far as halloween parties go. However, we had a really nice couple of parents donate pumpkins to us for decorations, and decided that we had enough to let all the children help clean and carve them.
I want to say that it was great to be able to get all the children involved, normally only the children who stay awake for the afternoon help in this special project. These are children who are kindergarten age or close to it (the others are napping). Since we had 5 pumpkins donated we decided to let the older children do one as a group, including measuring it, guessing how many seeds it contained, and then counting the seeds. Meanwhile the younger children would just clean out the 4 smaller pumpkins and draw faces for me to carve later.
The plan didn't sound so bad. I'd get the pumpkins all ready to go, bring the kids out in groups of 6 and when they finished I'd bring out the next group. And I have to say that the first group went pretty well with only a few unforeseen circumstances. The pumpkins we had were so little that it was hard for even the children to get their hands in the hole, much less the scrappers. So instead of letting the children scrape I had to loosen up the inside periodically so they could pull the guts out with their hands. 2 children took turns with that, while the other four sorted the seeds from the guts so we could save them for snack. Some children were a little hesitant about touching the squishy, sticky insides, but when they saw the others digging in most joined in with enthusiasm.
The other problem was our aprons. Because there was so much pumpkin gunk and sticky hands aprons were pretty much a necessity. Our normal aprons in the classroom are velcro, and definitely designed to be taken on and off independently. Unfortunately there aren't enough that I could borrow six for the entire morning, so I had to borrow the spares. All the spares, though, are tie aprons. I think we have 2, maybe 3 children in the classroom who can actually tie a bow, and none who can tie one behind their back. So guess who ended up tying and untying aprons for group?
Are you seeing the problem yet? Not only had I put myself in charge of the whole group, but given myself the added responsibility of scrapping the pumpkin and tying/untying aprons. Oh, and because of the time crunch and messiness of the project it wasn't worthwhile to let the children help clean up lit normal, so that was all on me too. After an hour and a half, and 24 children later I was exhausted, and there was a very orange, sticky table and floor.
In a regular preschool this kind of group activity happens most of the day, and in even bigger groups. The adults seem to spend most of their time going from one child to another, trying to make sure everyone is at roughly the same point in the project so they can all finish together. Some schools have the children clean up, but even then the clean up is minimal, like putting all the markers in a basket. I want to give a thumbs up of appreciation to anyone who works like that five days a week and still likes doing it. This little project really made me appreciate how helpful teaching the children in our class to be independent and not only work without direct supervision, but to also clean up afterwards. It makes it so much easier for us teachers as well actually giving the children the opportunity to have quality one on one time, since we don't need to focus our attention on multiple children learning how to do the same project.
Oh, and after all the busyness in the morning I still spent almost an hour in the afternoon actually carving the pumpkins and finishing sorting the seeds. Though they did turn out pretty cute!
 |
| Our children designed pumpkins, (just a little soft from sitting inside over the weekend...oops!) |
No comments:
Post a Comment