Learning Club and Mittens
I love our learning club. We just started our Spring Semester with some major revamps. We have added 3 new families.
The Big Kid Group (first grade and up) has shifted its focus from history to science. I will alternate teaching this with one other mom. This group does science first and then art.
The Kindergarten group has split off completely now and has their own teachers. Since I have no kids in this group and do not teach it at all, I really have very little idea what they do. All I know is that i helps immensely in teaching the big kids since the range of abilities is much smaller.
The tag alongs are now an official preschool group. There are 4 currently and it may be going up to 6. We do a stART activity each week. I had the privilege of teaching this group for its inaugural session. I picked The Mitten as our primary story in honor of our first real snow of the year. The version I found was much nicer than the one I read with Froggy so many years ago. The sidebars were a fun hint of the story to come. The illustrations were much richer. My audience enjoyed the story and stayed attentive through the entirety.
After the story, we sang a fun action song imitating each animal as it takes its turn snuggling into the mitten until that final sneeze sent us scurrying in all directions. All the children collapsed in giggles.
Knowing my audience I had brought along a couple of other snow stories so we read Thomas Gets a Snow Plow as well before continuing with our craft. The boys had so much fn showing me who all the different trains were.
Then we moved downstairs for our craft. These are young preschoolers who I had not worked with before so I kept it very simple. Each child cut out a mitten of their choosing then they glued animals I had cut out for them onto the mitten snuggling each animal in in turn. Some of the children then colored those animals. It was neat watching the differences in how the children approached the project. This is the first time I have ever down a significant craft with multiple preschoolers. The differences were clearly personality not gender or age. I look forward to having Tiger join us at future groups.
The Big Kid Group (first grade and up) has shifted its focus from history to science. I will alternate teaching this with one other mom. This group does science first and then art.
The Kindergarten group has split off completely now and has their own teachers. Since I have no kids in this group and do not teach it at all, I really have very little idea what they do. All I know is that i helps immensely in teaching the big kids since the range of abilities is much smaller.
The tag alongs are now an official preschool group. There are 4 currently and it may be going up to 6. We do a stART activity each week. I had the privilege of teaching this group for its inaugural session. I picked The Mitten as our primary story in honor of our first real snow of the year. The version I found was much nicer than the one I read with Froggy so many years ago. The sidebars were a fun hint of the story to come. The illustrations were much richer. My audience enjoyed the story and stayed attentive through the entirety.
After the story, we sang a fun action song imitating each animal as it takes its turn snuggling into the mitten until that final sneeze sent us scurrying in all directions. All the children collapsed in giggles.
Knowing my audience I had brought along a couple of other snow stories so we read Thomas Gets a Snow Plow as well before continuing with our craft. The boys had so much fn showing me who all the different trains were.
Then we moved downstairs for our craft. These are young preschoolers who I had not worked with before so I kept it very simple. Each child cut out a mitten of their choosing then they glued animals I had cut out for them onto the mitten snuggling each animal in in turn. Some of the children then colored those animals. It was neat watching the differences in how the children approached the project. This is the first time I have ever down a significant craft with multiple preschoolers. The differences were clearly personality not gender or age. I look forward to having Tiger join us at future groups.
The Mitten has definitely been a popular book this week :) My girls also really enjoy this book I love how the sidebars are hints to what happens next in the story too. The mittens that they made for their project are a great way to help them re-tell the story when they show off their completed project!!
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing and linking up to stART :)
~Michelle @ A Mommy's Adventures
I love all Jan Brett books because of illustrations. Daughter didn't like her before but now really enjoys her books and loves "the clues" in the sidebars. Thanks for joining WMCIR!
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