Our Valentine party was a blast this year! I'm not a huge fan of commercial holidays, but I happen to love Valentine's Day. If you get rid of the pressure to buy silly things for people that they don't need and drop the romantic Hollywood "love" bit,  it's possible to make the day just about one important thing we all need more of : LOVE.  Why not have a day to celebrate love and how it exists around us. Sure, we should do that everyday, but I vote for having a day that's devoted to remembering all of the love in our lives. 

Today we focused our activities around some central questions:

How can we teach our students and children to express love?  
How can we make sure our students know they are loved?  


I teach a good amount of sign language here. I'm proficient in American Sign Language and think it to be a complex and beautiful language that everyone would benefit from learning. it also gives students a kinesthetic way to express themselves when they can't get the words to come out! One of the activities I set up was a sign language "I LOVE YOU" hand that I found on Pinterest (with no website link). If anyone knows who originally came up with please add the link!

They each traced their own hand independently, so some of them came out beautifully wonky. I love looking at them hanging on the walls, it warms my heart!

Another of our activities involved some Math Play!  Each student received a small container of conversation hearts that they sorted by color. After sorting them on the graph they took off the hearts (each got to eat one) and colored in the bar graph with the appropriate color.  Each of the students was able to identify how many of each color they had simply by looking at the graph. They were also able to identify Most, Least and Equal!

Some chose to practice their cutting skills, moving away from straight lines and cutting out hearts.  This brought about more Math Play through discussions on symmetry as we cut out half a heart on folded paper to make a full heart with two symmetrical sides. 

Student then tried to copy the words from the conversation candy hearts onto their paper hearts. A few needed hand over hand assistance, but most were able to do it independently. It was a fun Early Literacy lesson.



We have a good amount of large easel paper slathered in paint from the first few weeks of school before they actually started to try to paint pictures and were just all about putting as much paint on the canvas as they could. I took some pinking shears and cut hearts out of a few of those paintings and had them out while the kids went between activities. I sat there and waited as they came up to be one by one and we talked about who loved them and who they loved back. We decided to express some of those emotions on the backs of the hearts I had cut out as as they dictated their notes. We stuck all of our Valentine's to a string and hung them at the door for the families to read when they arrived for pick up. My favorite was one that a student wrote to his dog, Pumpkin:
     Pumpkin,
    I think you talk.
    I'll give you a treat when I get home.
    Love,
    W.

Of course, it wouldn't be a real post if I didn't talk about food, now would it? What says love more than cooking together? We spent the rest of the morning baking gingerbread (by student request) and the afternoon decorating and eating them. We made an improvised gluten-free gingerbread recipe:

3-1/2 cups Pamela's Gluten-Free Bread Mix 
2 TBS ground cinnamon 
1 tsp baking powder 
2 TBS ground ginger 
1/3 cup unsalted butter or margarine
1/2 cup  brown sugar
1 egg
1 to 2 tbsp water

Now, this is real preschool art, not art Martha Stewart made to be picture perfect for everyone on Pinterst. This is Preschool Food Art made withLOVE :)  Spreading the frosting gave them some fine motor skill development, as did the decorating. I was impressed that they remembered where the heart was in the body (from our trip to the vet) and as you can clearly see, the alien gingie with hearts for eyes: he's in love.  

Overall, it was a joyful day filled with learning and play and play and learning and more play. I hope that each of them went home and told someone they love them. That would make it perfect. 

One of the things I learned as a kid was not to play with my food. I never listened and always got a good talking to for it.

The good talking to would be miraculously erased from  my brain the moment my eyes lifted from looking at my shoes and saw the palette of colors on my plate.

Kids seem to have a natural need to play with their food.  I often watch in amazement during  lunch as  dramatic scenarios between a carrot , a potato chip, and a lonely water bottle that are fit for prime time unfold before me.

After years of working with children, many of them as a behavior specialist, I have learned (sometimes the hard way) that if their instincts tell them to do something, they are going to find a way to do it, so you may as well help them do it right. Though there are other reasons to encourage food play at school.

Incorporating snack time into the learning day gives me another way to present the lesson.  Snack isn't something that is prepared by me or another adult, it's often another learning station they can choose from.   Sometimes I include visual recipes, like we did in Banana Ghosts,  other times supplies are put out and their creativity goes wild like we did in the first installment of How to Play with Your Food.   I often make surprise play food for them to go along with a Theme like I did in Monster Toes or I incorporate our snack into whole day's  lesson as we did when we ground corn we grew here into flour and made Blue Corn Mush as a snack.

Today our snack table had containers with  sunflower seed butter (like peanut butter),rice cakes, raisins, blackberries, and shredded coconut. We've been short on snow this year, so I think some of them have been missing that part of the winter. J. made a snowperson by lathering the rice cake with sun butter, sprinkling on some coconut, and using raisins as the eyes and nose. He got some fine motor work in by spreading the sun butter with a knife and placing the raisins and had a pretty tasty snack to boot.

How do you play with your food?

Like every good early childhood educator, I have the paint and easel out for a good portion of the day.  At the very start of the school year it was used regularly and every time someone painted the end result looked  something like this:

For the first few weeks they each took about one or two turns at the easel, lathering as much paint as the paper could handle, but after that was over the easel just sat there going unused for weeks. The plain white paper seemed lonely and the whiteness screamed to be set free of its blank and pointless existance. The kids had no interest and despite my encouragement, seemed bored with the idea of painting. It  seemed as if they felt they'd reached their creative peak and didn't know where to go from there. 

I was disheartened too, but not about their art. Art is more about process than product and to be honest, I think their product was beautiful.  I was disappointed that I couldn't figure out how to engage them in using the easel creatively. I wanted them to want to paint more and to be proud of what they painted. I needed something that would get their creative juices flowing.  Besides, I had to do something with all that easel paper I bought at IKEA, right?  

That was when I found the idea for art dice from Tinkerlab and got inspired to transfer it to the easel to see what would happen. I had a Discovery Toys "Crazy Cubes" that I purchased at a garage sale that allowed me to change pictures through the plastic sides.  I drew some simple line designs so the pictures would fit in the plastic slots and also made some extra ones so they could change them whenever they wanted. The die only has four slots so I when it lands on "Crazy Cube" they just giggle and yell "CrazyCubeCrazyCubeCrazyCube!!!" which adds a touch of much needed silliness to the game.  I'm sure I could add some plastic, but I think I like watching them yell "CrazyCubeCrazyCubeCrazyCube!!!" too much.

Within a week they were all at the easel playing the Crazy Cubes game. Sometimes they took turns rolling the die and painting the same picture together, other times they did it alone.  Just two weeks after introducing the Cube their painting has gone from this:

To this:

To this:

This last painting is the students' attempt to paint the horse, Seabiscuit, from the book,  Seabiscuit the Wonder Horse, a picture book we read in preparation for our trip to the Northstar Youth Ranch.

What excites me is that it's clear that the students used many of the shapes from the die in their paintings, even though the die wasn't out for this picture. Prior to us practicing with the die, they refused to attempt to paint anything specific. Now we look for shapes we know in pictures and that seems to give them a base to go off of.

I plan to add more shapes and eventually pictures for them to try their hand at.  The creative possibilities are endless!

I want to take this chance to explain the practice of open-ended lesson planning. The majority of what we do here is open-ended, not everything, but a good majority of what we plan has the potential to lead to something else. Often times that something else is more relevant, experiential, and FUN than anything I could have thought of on my own. Open-ended planning lets me create an outline and then work collaboratively with the students to create the finished project. It keeps me on my toes and forces me to let go of my A-type personality traits a little bit (okay A LOT).  I've always taught like this, so I have  decent amount of practice and and even more tricks up my sleeve that help me manage, but I really think any passionate teacher could do it. Here's the story of how one open-ended lesson turned out.

This Theme we are learning about animals and their connection to our community. How do they live? How do they help us? Why are they integral to our lives?  How can we help them?  These are all questions we will be asking ourselves and each other as we explore this Theme. 

Last week I had a play-doh area with small toy animals set out  where we had been making animal tracks. One student would cover their eyes, another would lay tracks in the play-doh and they would have to guess which animal made the tracks. This was a fun game and everyone stayed at this center for a good part of the morning. At least until one of the students wandered over to the book basket.
 
I always have a basket of books related to our Theme set out and it's available for them to look through at most parts of the day.  In the midst of the animal track game one of my friends asked for me to read  The Mixed-Up Chameleon by Eric Carle. This classic book has been used over and over again in the education realm in a multitude of creative ways. As I read it more students milled over and it spurned a discussion on predators and their prey and the ever popular concept of camouflage and how it's used by animals in their environment both to obtain food and hide from becoming food.

That's when the play-doh area came to life though a game of Predator/Prey. Some of the children were small fish made out of blue play-doh, others were big fish made of yellow play-doh.  The big fish "hunted" the little fish based on the "rules" we collaboratively came up with after learning about camouflage. The big fish could only see the little fish in two cases:

 1) It was hiding by something that was a totally different color and not using its camouflage to protect itself. 
2) It moved.