One of my favorite aspects of working with a team of teachers is the opportunity to learn from the many backgrounds and experiences of my colleagues.  Nora has been a wonderful addition to our teaching team, and I’ve invited her to tell us a bit about one area of the classroom that she has been influential in developing.

Dear Parents,

I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your kind and warm welcomes to Harbor City School. It has been delightful getting to know all of the children, and watching them learn and explore in their classroom environment. As many of you know, my experiences in early childhood education have been in a Montessori setting. One aspect of Montessori education that I wanted to share with Harbor City School is a Practical Life area.  This area is quite important in an early childhood setting as it lends it self, and supports many aspects of your child’s development and learning.

 Practical Life is an area of the classroom where children can explore and practice daily activities, such as pouring, scooping, spooning, squeezing, twisting, and other life skills.  Each material serves a meaningful purpose for the child as they learn to take on these kinds of tasks independently in their home and school environments. While appearing quite simple and repetitive, these materials are highly purposeful.  The children are not only practicing important life skills, they are increasing their concentration, their sense of order, hand eye coordination and independence. These repeated tasks also build self-esteem and determination as the student learns to take care of himself and the classroom.

 Practical Life also supports children’s emerging fine motor skills.  While manipulating different styles of spoons, tongs and other utensils, they are increasing their fine motor capabilities and strengthening their hands for writing.  Also, materials are deliberately placed on the shelf, according to the needs of the classroom.  They are modeled and then left to the child to practice. Each material has a special spot on the shelf as the materials move from simple to complex (complex meaning more steps in the work) and are placed left to right to train the child’s eye for reading and writing.

Although these materials are generally for one child to manipulate at a time, this area naturally supports children’s developing social skills.  Children learn how to interact with each other in positive ways and gain a sense of grace and courtesy with their environment and their peers.

Many of these tasks the child sees routinely performed in the home and can easily be transferred into your home environment.  Simply by involving your children in daily activities, such as sweeping, raking, shoveling, setting the table, cleaning, cooking, pouring, etc., they will gain a sense of independence and satisfaction that they can apply to other aspects of their learning. There is nothing like hearing a Tugboat say, “I did it all by myself!”

So far, this area has been a success and it has called the attention of many children. Since this is a new area for many of them, we have decided to introduce materials slowly, as this will give them time to understand and digest the expectations and work they are completing.

I’m looking forward to seeing this area of our classroom grow, as it is such an important part to early childhood education.  If you would like to talk some more about how practical life works, or how you would like to implement this at home, I would be happy to share ideas and resources with you.  Thanks again for all your kind welcomes and making Harbor City School a new home for me.

Best,

Nora Studley

Last week, we transitioned into discussions about how we take care of Our Earth. In our introductory week, we learned that Earth has special resources (land, water, and air) that living things need.  We must take care of those resources so that they can continue to support us!  Most of the Tugboats are familiar with recycling and can easily identify the universal blue bin, as well as the triangle shape that indicates recycling.  We talked a lot about the different things that can be re-made into new things: paper, plastic, metal, and glass.  We don’t use much glass at Harbor City School, so we limited our sorting activities to the first three.  The children practiced identifying the material an object is made of, as well as sorting those objects into their appropriate piles.  We also challenged them to search the classroom to find each of the three materials.  Finding new objects is a bit tougher than sorting the ones the teachers chose!  Finally, we closed out the week with an exploration of a different kind of recycling: making art!  Each child selected materials from a large pile of recyclables and made their own unique sculptures.  The process of choosing, envisioning, and assembling their works was quite intense and really a joy to observe.

In addition to Our Earth, this week was our time to study the letter F!  We assembled a list of words that begin with the letter F, including one of our own Tugboats.  We also made feathery footed Fs for our sensory letter project.  Our week ended on a mischievous note: while we were on the playground, a leprechaun visited our classroom and played tricks on us!  He or She left green footprints, swapped items around on the shelves, hid bits of gold, and even used the toilet!

Harbor City School will be closed today, March 19, due to snow and poor driving conditions.

We will see you tomorrow!

With each new month comes a new topic of study for the Tugboats.  This month we are exploring Our Earth.  Considering that this wonderful planet is hosting our lives, we should know a thing or two about it!  We’ve spent the first week introducing the idea of Earth: that it is a planet among other planets and it has specific features that make it ideal for living (including land, water, and air.)

We spent the week becoming familiar with the shapes and colors of our planet, first by making our own individual Earths from blue and green play dough.  Next, we got to know the difference between the land and water features of our Earth using watercolor and sand applied to card stock.  We thought carefully about air: what it is, how we can see it, and what is has the power to do.  Bubbles were the perfect sensory materials to use for these experiments!  We rounded out the week by examining how Earth supplies the necessary things for life (food, air, water, and sunlight), while also sustaining non-living things as well.  This weeks experiments focused on exploring new sensory materials and finding interesting ways to use them.  Each of our activities provided fine motor practice across a spectrum of skill levels.  Most importantly, we spent a lot of time conducting scientific inquiry and encouraging our students to ask lots of questions and to continue seeking answers, even if they are difficult to find.

In the midst of all of this fun, we also had a visit from a wonderful local puppeteer named Nicola McEldowney (check out our Facebook update for photos!)  We held our weekly Chinese lesson with Zhi, Elisabeth’s mom, and conducted a review of all that we’ve learned so far.  The Tugboats are creating quite a vocabulary for Chinese words and characters!