In the minds of 3-year-olds

If you've been following my blog this year, you know that my classroom has some special cases.  According to my director, a lot of them "need to be here." Ok, fine. I love them all but sometimes I don't know whether to laugh or go crazy. Here's a funny story of one of the 3-year-olds: A few kids in the class like to play checkers so I brought out the board this morning....

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Happy Un-Halloween!

I might not let my kids know it, but I'm a big believer in the idea that rules are made to be bent. In NC, teachers are encouraged to build on children's interests. Naturally, the children's thoughts are turning towards Halloween. There's just one problem: my center doesn't like Halloween.  Or any holidays, for that matter. I've had to get a little...creative this week,...

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This post is not Pin-worthy

 I'm sure there are other posts on this topic somewhere; at least I hope there are. I can't be the only one tired of all the cutesy stuff on Pinterest when it comes to children's art. Don't get me wrong; I can easily spend an hour Pinning, commenting, and following rabbit (Pin?) trails. There are a lot of great ideas out there. But when I see post after post about giving...

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Smile!

I was reviewing shapes this morning using some of the great ideas found here when some of the kids guessed correctly and I smiled. That's great for them, of course, but the strange part is how alien it felt. Do I really smile that little? I thought. I thought about it and even asked my assistant who assured me that I do smile. But it made me realize the power of something as simple as smiling. There's a Becky Bailey technique for calming...

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Representational Drawing

With the apples last week and insects this week, I realized something: this class is amazing at representational drawing!  When we talked about sunflowers one day, the children looked at photos and recreated them fairly accurately.  This week we talked about spiders; some of the children needed help with shapes, so I gave them a few shapes to glue together. We...

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