Learning through Food

I love to eat! This coupled with it being one of the best motivators on the planet, I like to use food in my classroom a lot.
Cooking is great, but not every cooking project is feasible with Toddlers. Even if you could do it with one or two at home, once you have eight of them in the room many cooking projects go out the window. I've had some great success with using food as an activity and many failures. Usually it comes down to involvement. If the kids are involved your golden, if it is not interesting enough you've got a problem!
Here are the best and the worst in my experience so far:
Lasagna is pretty quick in the classroom and fairly simple. It is also great because all the ingredients are already cooked, so time in the oven is to melt everything more than to be food safe, you always can microwave a piece or two later. I usually go for making a thing lasagna, with two thinner layers. This makes it easier to keep children engaged and easier later to give out bite size pieces. Lasagna being a dish with basically the same ingredients as most pasta dishes the children have already had is great for several reasons. One they already have experience with the ingredients and are more likely to try it. Also this is a new and interesting way to use those ingredients, and finally they get to explore how these ingredients go together, instead of just being served the finished product. When I start the project I talk a lot about "building" the lasagna, and how we have cheese, pasta and tomato sauce just like in other pasta dishes. I've found that once I show them what layer we are on, they do most of the rest. They builders in my class really enjoy putting down the pasta noodles, while the more sensory inclined members love the spreading and pouring. And then you are left with lunch, and usually a new idea for all the parents!

Pomegranates are amazing, first they are a fruit that is different and interesting. They are also a fruit and usually on the sweeter side, so that helps. That they have so many seeds makes them into an engineering problem. And the seeds also provide practice for budding fine motor skills. I usually just cut one in fourths or eighths and give it to each child skin and all. I then pick out a few seeds with them and show them how yummy they can be. At this point they are usually so excited they just go at it. Each time they use all their skills together to get a seed out, they get the instant gratification of a sweet burst in their mouth. I've seen a child sit for a good thirty minutes picking out seeds. Though be carful, the juice does stain, and this is a messy project all around.

Play dough Cookies is what I have dubbed them, they are basically old sugar cookie dough, revitalized with food coloring added. My mother in law had some sugar cookie dough that sat in the fridge and became hard, I took it to school and to make it workable I added some extra milk and food coloring. It was still really firm dough, and with the bright colors looked like play dough!So I let each child pick what color and gave them a blob for them to play with. If they ate it, it was not a big deal, and if they just put it in their mouth, it would be in the oven long enough to kill any bacteria they might have left behind. They made all sorts of things, and they were all told that each child only got one cookie, no matter how many they ended up making. They were fine with this, and I truly think they had more fun making the cookies than eating them.

Finally Apple Turnovers are a great and simple project, but be warned you need to get the right dough and keep it at their level, other wise this project can go from really fun for everyone into a disaster for the teacher, and the children not liking it either. You need frozen pie crust, apples, a little bit of sugar and cinnamon. I tried it with philo dough once, and it didn't cook through. It also was a very odd textures to the point the children didn't want to eat it. With pie crust, you just cut it into small squares, in a separate bowl mix up cut pieces of apple, the sugar to taste and the cinnamon. Spoon a dollop of mixture in the middle of each square and pinch close. The filling is quick enough to maintain attention, and the pinching is a great use of budding fine motor skills. If they fall open in the oven, they are still amazing. That is why this project is idiot proof, it is really hard to mess up!

Now the worst food project I've ever done is California Rolls. The kids were not into it for several reasons, and I ended up losing their attention and making them all by myself. The rice being too sticky turned off some of the kids, then having to spread it didn't help. I put in the avocado in the middle and showed them how to roll it. At this point they decided it was too hard and found something else to do. They came out super yummy, but I was also the one who got to eat them. This is not something I would suggest doing with a group under six.

In all food is an amazing tool to learn with. The biggest lesson I've found is to keep it simple. Most children don't want to try something that they have never tried before, and the more complicated it is, the more resistant they will be. Giving them just one thing to play with as much as to eat gives them a chance to really experience a food and use all their skills on it. This way they can have fun and remember it, and then parents can give it to them at home to eat. I find they get out all the playing with a new food at school and then are much more willing to eat it at home. Keeping it simple also makes things calmer, there is less preparation, meaning less stress. Remember the goal is to have fun, learning will happen naturally in the process.
Thanks for reading!

First Impressions

I'm currently working at a Reggio Emilia inspired center. I love the approach of following what the children have interest in. Not only do I get to learn by doing everyday, we have started reading two books to help us further our own education, and expand what we do in our classrooms.
The two books are Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Approach to Early Childhood Education
the second edition of the original text that brought Reggio to American classrooms. It is technical in some areas and very dry in others, but it is the main text that everything else has learned from and modified. The first two chapters have been quite enlightening and daunting. It starts off with a history of the area and what led to preschools and daycare centers being run in such a different way. While this is very interesting in theory, reading it was dull, and then they give a chapter by chapter introduction. This setting up of the book made me feel like I was in store for a lot of learning, but have learned nothing so far. The second chapter gave us the big lessons that can be learned from this approach. Again I was left with a feeling of anticipation of what I can learn, but still I was left with little as to what to do in my everyday classroom.
The other book is Bringing Reggio Emilia Home: An Innovative Approach to Early Childhood Education a book that is made up of vignettes of other peoples experiences in Reggio classrooms. I really had a hard time with the first chapter. It was mostly about this year long vacation this one women had in Italy where she worked in Reggio Emilia. It was a nice story, but left me with envy, and little take away for my classroom. Though some day I would love to put dress up where the coat hooks are, so children can undress from outside clothes and redress in whatever they want.
I'm sure I will learn more, and really can't wait to see how both these books change the way I teach. I became a teacher because I love to learn and watch others learn. I'm very excited to have this opportunity to learn more. We will see where this journey takes me.
Thanks for reading!

Painting on a Rug

As a teacher I'm an avid recycler. I don't know of any program that has infinite money for materials, so what usually happens is we find materials and reperpose them in fun ways.
Recently a co-worker of mine brought in different pieces of flooring. She brought us some vynil, and big pieces of carpet. I love to paint on big pieces of paper, as I explained in my previous post. I thought about what if we put paint on it. The carpet would absorb the paint as they mushed it around. That sounded like too much fun to pass up.
So knowing this would probably be a whole body painting project, we decided to save the parents laundry and forwent clothing. They needed no introduction to the concept and jumped right in.

They all started with sitting down and putting their hands on the pain and maybe squishing their feet around in it.

Then they got up and danced over the carpet. One group decided that running over the carpet was enough and after they were done with that decided they were done painting.

The other group took a more full body approach to painting. They did summer salts across the carpet. Tried to paint with their hair. Rolled around in the paint. The carpet was great for all of this, because it was soft, and also it absorbed a lot of the paint, so less got on the kids themselves, though there was plenty to still get messy in.

At one point they found a pumpkin left over from a project a few weeks back and decided to have that go rolling over the paint to see what would happen. Some how no paint got onto that pumpkin.

We had a blast, even with clean up being as it was. I basically got to give each child a bath to get off the excess paint.
The two pieces are now up in our hallway on the wall. So they can touch their artwork and revisit it everyday. I hung up papers for parents and children to comment on the project, we will see what response we get. This is definitely a project that is going down in my history book!
Thanks so much for reading.
Remember, Have Fun!

Gross Motor Painting

My background is in Art, Graphic Design specifically. I was on my way to a degree that would have me sitting in front of a computer for 8 hours a day when I got a job at a preschool, the first one since high school, and fell so much in love with what I was doing that I switched my major and my whole career trajectory.
That being said, I've had alot of art classes and use what I learned in them almost as much as what I've learned sitting in Early Childhood Education Classes.
One of my favorite art teachers of all time taught me two important things about art. One that to really be able to use a color you need to experience that color fully. She would always encourage us to eat colorfully. "you must taste the color before you can use it." I use this today to assure parents that really their little one is a budding Picasso, that is why he puts the markers in his mouth. This also makes sense when you think that we experience the world through our mouths first, before we start to incorporate other senses into our exploration of the world. Why would the exploration of color and drawing be any different?
The second most important thing she taught me was that when you draw using your whole body you come out with a very different result. We are taught most of our lives that drawing is an activity we do sitting down at a table. Along with that we are taught that smaller is better, art and drawing especially should be done on a 8x11 piece of paper max, and we are constantly entertained by media that is smaller than that. Now when any art history fanatic really thinks of this they have to disagree. Some of our most influential art pieces, around the world, are huge, almost larger than life. I'll let you fill in the specific examples here. So why do we teach that art is done when sitting down on a small piece of paper? This teacher gave us a paper that was as tall as we were and asked us to do a self portrait that covers the space. This lesson has stuck with me.
I love to do Gross Motor Art! For the layman Gross Motor refers to using the whole body, while Fine Motor refers to activities using the fingers and hands primarily. Art is many times placed in the Fine Motor development category. Now if you've ever met a toddler, having all creative expression be confined to Fine Motor activities seems laughably absurd. Yet all too often art is stuck on the table. I've worked hard to change this for the kids I work with.
One example was when we painted on a bulletin board. The center I was at had an amazing amount of cork boards everywhere and I was getting sick and tired of covering everyone up with paper and a border. I figured out that if I pushed a table up against the wall of one the kids could get up to it and paint on it. I started by putting up some cut out of clouds and covering the wall around the board with plastic. Then I game them blue paint and let them go at it.

It was a beautiful summer afternoon, and quite warm inside, so it made sense to have them in diapers as to not get paint all over their clothes. They had such a blast. I did have one that was just so happy to have paint that she ate it the whole time. The rest were so happy to be painting standing up!

By the end everything was blue! Even most of the kitchen we were painting in.

We all had a blast, the finished sky was great, it made it easy to put up artwork without having to put up a new background each time.
I recently did another type of "wall" painting. We had a few kids talking about house improvements in the play house outside. I immediently went to "well lets paint the house". It being untreated wood, this is not the best idea. We talked about the fence next, and found that part of our fence is actually plastic and white, a perfect canvas. The next day we took them outside with paint brushes and big paint tubs.

We quickly figured out that it would be best to take their shirts off before they were painted as well. Then we got the inevitable body painters, but that is a for another post. This was our beautiful fence before I had to wash it off. They had a blast painting it, and really used their whole bodies, reaching up on tippie toes to get to the top of the fence to paint or crouching down to get to the bottom.

Now gross motor painting dose not have to be so messy, you can use big sheets of paper, I just enjoy the messyness of some projects. So that is one of my favorite projects to do, I can't wait to see how it changes for next time.
Thanks for Reading!

Train Picture Frames

This one is an example of me using what is around. I tend to do so much better with figuring out what is around to use and then making a project, instead of thinking of a project and then getting the stuff for it. I'm the same way with cooking. I open up all the cupboards, and the fridge, figure out what I have and then come up with an idea of what I'm making for dinner.
I'm going to keep talking about that Transportation unit I did way back when. After cars we did Trains. Not that a lot of kids were going on trains over the holiday vacation, but it was a good way to tie in The Polar Express. I live in an area that recreates the Polar Express every year and at least half my class was talking about it. Now this is also the time of year that parents like gifts. I always kept to the rule, one holiday gift and one gift with a picture.
This was the one for the picture. A Train picture frame.
At the time I had a director that would come up with stuff that she got for free, and give it to me to do something with. She had just gotten these boxes of letters on circles. I think they were to personalize cards, or something like that.

I figured out (with help from Google image search) how to make some simple geometric pieces into a train. I cut out the pieces and made the big square piece into a frame. I then picked out all the letter for each child's name and put them in cups, all scrambled. I game them a cup with all the pieces and a cup with their name and a visual of how I made my own.

The then got to put them together. They did an amazing job, they got to use their deductions skills on what piece went where. They got to unscramble their name, putting each letter in the right order. And they got to build a train, all in the same project. Needless to say they were super excited to give them to their parents.

On the card that went with, I quoted each on what they wanted to say to their parents. Many commented on how cool the train was that they were bringing home or where they wanted to hang it. This was my favorite holiday project, especially because you wouldn't even know it was for the holidays.

Building Cars

I'm going to go back through my favorite projects that I've done. I love making things out of other things. This is great as a teacher, because it is much easier to save water bottles than it is to get a car kit for every kid.
I had a group that loved cars, really any transportation. Around the holidays all they could talk about was how they were going to get to their different destinations. Not who or where they were going to go, but how they were getting there. So we did a transportation month.
The first week was cars.
We painted with cars, by rolling their wheels in paint and then rolling them on the paper.

We also engineered our own cars. It was a fun project that I got to come up with, and the kids got to bring home a toy they can play with. Here is how we did it:
Supplies

Vitamin Water Bottles (They are thicker than regular water bottles and hold up to what you will do to them)
Long wind Chimes (from oriental trading company)
Round wood pieces (or Beads with a big enough hole to fit onto the wind chimes)
Hot Glue
A Drill

Pom Poms (optional)
Pipe cleaners (optional)

We started by drilling holes into the bottles to fit the wind chimes through. The Wind Chimes would become the axles. I did the drilling in class with the kids at a good distance. Some of the kids were so excited about a power tool being used in the class, they tried to take home the bottles with just the holes in them.
I then had the kids fit the "axles" through the holes. They had to figure out which holes fit together to get a straight axle. Then we proceeded to pick out matching wood pieces. They just needed two sets of two wheels. So that each axle had the same wheel on each side.
I did the hot glue part, affixing the wood to each side of the wind chimes that where now in the bottles.
We finished off the project with putting pom poms and pipe cleaners inside the bottles to make them pretty.

We then ran into a problem. To maintain structural integrity I had made the holes too high up the side of the bottles. So they "belly" of our cars kept them from being on all four wheels. We figured this out by making tracks on the floor. The wheels rolled along both sides on the blocks while the bottle hung down in the middle. They got to engineer the tracts as well, making sure the side where not to far apart and not to close, as well as keeping them straight.

We had so much fun, that we played with them all day for the next week. If they went home, they came back, because the kids couldn't put them down. It was so much fun.

We got to practice taking turns, balancing, and of course our engineering abilities. I can't wait to do this project again some day!