family
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Engaging families in community service projects
This week I’ve been sharing ideas for starting a community service project in the preschool classroom. For any school community service project to be successful you have to engage families and get them excited about the project. This is not always an easy feat, so here are some of the ways that I’ve encouraged parent participation – and actually gotten it! Get the children excited about the project – when you’re working with preschoolers you can use their enthusiasm to your advantage. If the children are excited about your project then they will not stop talking about it, they will let their parents in on every single detail, and they’ll…
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Explaining assessment to families
Assessment in preschool is definitely a thing – it’s a huge part of what early childhood educators do every day, but most casual observers would never know that. This is because it’s not obvious. As teachers it important to be able to explain this unique assessment process to parents and family members so that they have a clear understanding of how we know what skills and concepts their child has mastered. There are two things that make preschool assessments just a little different; First, preschool assessments should be formative assessments. This simply means that you are using the results of any assessment to plan further activities and learning experiences. These…
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Helping your child get ready for preschool
As a preschool teacher I spend a ton of time making sure that children are prepared to start kindergarten, but I don’t always think about helping children prepare for preschool. Maybe that’s because there’s so much that I can do to help once they start, but I don’t often get to work with families before they start attending. If you know any children who will be starting preschool this fall, whether they’re your own children, new students that will be in your class, or even just friends’ children, here are a few things that parents can do to help little ones prepare for those first few days: Talk about it…
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Great app to share with families
I am a self-proclaimed family engagement queen, I tend to collect ideas and resources for sharing with families and not have enough opportunities to share all of them! This one must be shared with all of you because it is amazing!!! Go check out Vroom – do it right now! This site is all about building parents up and reminding them that they have what it takes to help their child’s brain grow and develop. From the videos and information on the site itself, to the great materials that families can download, to the free app that gives them daily activities personalized for their child’s age, this site is an…
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Book Talk Tuesday – The Family Book
Now that my students have begun to come down from their Halloween high, it’s time to start thinking about Thanksgiving. I’ve always taught Thanksgiving a little differently. In my experience, young children can’t begun to understand the symbolism related to Pilgrims and Native Americans because they don’t have the background understanding of the historical value that these symbols represent. In the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving my class spends a lot of time exploring the concept of family – the people who make up our families, what it means to be a family, and reasons why families are important. These are all topics that children can easily understand and relate…
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Taking a break!
I love my work, but today I am enjoying life and the next two days of celebrating my favorite holiday. Since it’s Thursday I thought I’d share a couple of #throwbackthursday photos with you. These were taken four years ago while watching fireworks with my favorite people – my sister and my husband.
