At Miss Kathleen's center today, we used a big kid pencil to draw a face, some crayons to color it in, and then peeled off some stickers to decorate our paper. (While the boys and girls were working on this, it gave me a chance to start my evaluations. I watched to see which hand was used in drawing/coloring; whether or not each child was gripping the writing utensil correctly; and how developed their fine motor skills were in peeling the stickers off of the sticker sheet. This gives us a baseline to work with in planning centers and activities.)
At Miss Paula's center, we used scissors to cut shapes from some long strips of paper and then we drew and wrote on our chalkboards. (This gave another opportunity to observe handedness and to see which children could cut independently. We'll work on using scissors and building our grip throughout the year.)
At our rug center, we continued with imaginary play in our kitchen and introduced some of our wooden blocks. (Often on the first day of play with a new activity, there's a lot of exploration. Children often play alone, investigating and trying things out. By day two and three, there's more interaction and some teamwork starting. Often we'll leave centers out for a week to develop this. A little later in the year, we'll ask for parent volunteers to come in and guide/mentor some of our rug centers. Having an adult model block building/planning or puppet play can help kids view materials in new ways.)
After we cleaned up our centers, we went out on the playground where we had a blast!
When we came back in we had a bathroom break and made sure we washed our hands--because even if our hands didn't look dirty, they had invisible germs on them! Then we sang Happy Birthday and had a special snack!
We had a great day! Enjoy the weekend!
