Buckling down

There was work galore happening this morning, and really focused, challenging work.

I was so amazed this morning when I brought in the tray for food work and after setting everything out found that I could sit down and observe the children work for a little while. I thought I'd get maybe a minute or two, but I got closer to 10 minutes of uninterrupted observation. This is what we're striving for in our classroom; children who can make choices and work on those activities independently. A couple of girls were playing a game with the pink tower, an older boy was setting up the farm while a younger child observed him, two children were walking carefully on the line. Every where I looked children were engaged in activities or walking to the shelves with purpose.

It's great to be able to watch these children mature and settle down in to the routine, especially the older ones. Some have never stayed for the afternoon, or have napped during that work cycle so having an extra two hours every day has really exploded their abilities. M is one of those who has always gone home after the morning work cycle, this is her first year staying all afternoon. She just turned 5 in November and over the past month has discovered she can read. It started with the little slips we have for clean up jobs at the end of the day and went from there. This morning I watched M use the moveable alphabet with a friend to write little commands (like "sit on a mat"), read them and act them out. Now that's awesome progress, not only being able to read the words but really interpret them as well. 

Below is the work of another Kindergartener. T traced each country from the puzzle map of Europe, colored them in, labeled them and then wrote the name of the country on a separate piece of paper. Not a bad way to practice and learn capital letters!

Another example was with another M girl. We've always known she was very artistic and musical, she takes piano and her older sister plays the violin so there's a lot of formal music education as well. The other day though I heard her playing Christmas songs on our melody harp--from memory! We have little cards that slide in under the strings of the instrument so the children learn which string to pluck, but I'm not ever sure that we have the songs she was playing. Anyways I asked M if she'd like to learn how to play little songs on the bells, she was a little hesitant, telling me that she didn't know how to read regular music. But after talking to me, walking away, coming back again she finally decided that in the afternoon she wanted to learn some more work with the bells. Together we labeled the bells, learned the parts of the staff and the placement of the notes. M was really in to it and was even more proud when she realized that she had had the most presentations on the bells of any of the other kindergartners.  Ok, so we're not supposed promote competition like that but it really was an accomplishment she could be proud of since she puts so much work in to her music.