Hello All,
We made it through the first week! It went well! Thank you for all your support.
This last week we started our grace and courtesy lessons. This is something we will work on all year but really focus on at the beginning. This includes things like how to greet someone, how to interrupt politely, how to wash your hands, how to clean up after lunch, and many more. We are also doing some get to know you games and will be doing team building games. We started our great lessons. The great lessons are, The Beginning, The Timeline of Life, The Coming of Man, The History of Writing, and The History of Math. During these lessons we talk about theories and share with the children that the great lessons are theories of how the universe came to be or how man came to be. We stress that a theory is someone’s best guess and it may or may not be true. We also invite them all to share their theories and teach that it is important and wonderful that we are all different. We also teach them that the most important theory is the one that they learn at home. The great lessons are a way to expose them to different lines of thought and allow them to learn more about others ideas and explore their own. If you would like to know more about the great lessons you can visit miss barbara. This is a link many of us at MMA use to refresh our knowledge before teaching the great lessons and also where we get some good extensions for them.
My plan for this year in regards to painting is to have some painting shirts that we will keep with our art supplies in the classroom. Many of you were able to send some painting shirts when we painted on Thursday. Most students took these shirts home after they used them. If you would like to send their shirt anytime, I will put their name in it and leave it with our art supplies. Also, if you have some you just want to donate, I will also keep those with our art. We do teach how to use the paint and clean up but they are kids and painting is fun, so sometimes things are forgotten.
I will have the outline for the year, home projects, and for field trips done later this week and post that on the blog as well as have it for you at back to school night. Don’t forget that back to school night is Thursday, September 7. More information about this will come.
Tomorrow we will start our work cycle. This will only be an hour or so long and will mainly be small group lessons and some practical life such as, table scrubbing, how to fold a shirt, spreading butter on bread, and some others. Practical life is practiced a lot in early childhood but also benefits other children because it teaches them things they will need to know how to do in life.
Thanks again for all your support. Ms. Sara and I have loved getting to know all the students and we are very excited for this year. What we do isn’t always easy but we love it and and the benefits far out way any of the negatives.
Take care!
Jalee