Road Trip (Part I)

Two of our dear friends moved back to Florida last week.  We are already missing their smiles.  Sigh….

No worries! The children have a plan….

We’re going on a road trip to Florida! Yippee! Oh, fine, it is only imaginary, but we can still make our plans.  To assist in the planning, I photocopied all of the pertinent states from my trusty road atlas and stitched them together with old-fashioned scotch tape.  The class was quite surprised to find such a spaghetti mess of roads between here and there.  Yet undaunted, they began to take action.

First, the children decided we needed a car to get there.  Enter our trusty stand-by, a nice empty box.

Here are a few bits demonstrating the process and explaining some of the technical details:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YA9XSOPMVs]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwehzMJmp0A&w=560&h=315]

I think we’ll need to attack the map next….

Building Connections

We love blocks in our classroom. We have large blocks, small blocks, magnetic blocks, wooden blocks, plastic blocks, sometimes we even make our own cardboard blocks. We tote them around, build them out and up, design rooms and spaces, use them as imaginary tools, and create intricate structures to support our stories. Sure, they’re fun, but why highlight them as a major part of our daily life?

Experimenting with blocks engages our children’s physical, social/emotional, cognitive, and language development.  While building in a group, a child will engage in dialog regarding sharing, shape usage, design planning, and idea exchanges. A quick article explaining more about the learning behind block use can be found in the Community Playthings Resources

At this time of the year we usually see much of the second stage of block building, creating rows and stacks.

 

http://www.communityplaythings.com/resources/articles/blocks/blockbuilding.html

http://www.teachingstrategies.com/content/pageDocs/CC4_Ch6_exrpt.pdf