If there's one thing I could talk about endlessly, it would be my job and working with the preschoolers. And...I pretty much do (poor Dave). Maybe it's time to expand my audience, and, for the purposes of blogging, I'll try to keep it light.
Each week we do a different theme/book with the kids. This week's was an especially good one. (Is there a more perfect book for preschooler's than "The Very Hungry Caterpillar?" -I think you could make a pretty strong case for it.) Anyway, for large group language activities, the kids got to follow directions to find various food items and feed them to a paper-bag caterpillar-puppet (which some of the children called "the monster" even though we'd been talking about "caterpillars" all week...pretty typical...well, it really did kind of look like a monster since I'd hand-drawn it).
FACT: as a whole, 4-year-old children love almost nothing so much as feeding pretend food items to a paper-bag puppet; I do not know why this is the case, yet it remains a law of nature. Some of the younger kids though, did try to cheat by putting their food pictures in the bag's opening instead of in the monster's -er, I mean, the caterpillar's mouth.
For our second activity, we tried sorting food vs. nonfood items, during which time many pretend food and other items were taste-tested by the kids -(sometimes you do start to feel like a record on endless repeat, "just pretend, just pretend, just pretend!").
We acted out the story with our bodies for the 3rd activity, by wrapping the kids up in a blanket ("cocoon"); most of the kids could hardly wait for their turn to jump in. And here, finally, we come to the preschool moment of the week: opening up the "cocoon" to see their smiling little faces, so eager to burst out and hop/flap around like crazy butterfly things. And then, that moment when you know you've accomplished something as a teacher -when you know they've made some connections- hearing the kids across the hall saying, "I got to be a butterfly -I came out, and I was a butterfly!!"
Jasper chooses this book to read almost nightly. He's also added a lot of his own art.
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