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!