UPK Full Day - Cooking, Cooking, Cooking!
The UPK kids have been very busy this winter. We’ve been working on several themes. We started out with a trip to the pizza store. Not only did this offer a snack that all the children loved, it gave us an opportunity to put our trip on paper, and each of the children were able to draw their experience for our pizza book. These are the children’s first experiences with the symbolic representation of their ideas on paper...a precursor to writing and reading.
We made paper pizza in art, and we made real pizza from scratch. We’ve used the housekeeping area to open a pretend pizza shop and extend the development of language as well as developing social skills as they interact and take turns being customers and servers. All this while they’re having fun playing and making friends.
Making pizza dough led to yeast experiments and now we’ll be baking a lot of bread for our cooking activities in the ensuing months. Our house keeping area will also take turns being a bake shop. Be ready for our bakers to open a bake shop in a few months so that you can taste some of our wares.
Our loft was turned into a pond and we’re talking about snakes and turtles. Crictor has made an appearance and the children are all looking forward to his visit. Crictor is a way of using great children’s literature to spark imagination, grow language and bring stories to life. Having the children dictate a journal entry and draw a picture is another way for children to learn that they can put their ideas on paper for other people to see. Even the children, who were somewhat reluctant to come to the art table, were especially enthusiastic about making their snake and couldn’t wait for their turn. It’s another way themes help inspire skills. We will use themes where it helps us, but will also feel free to step off the path for other interesting learning and playing opportunities. Soon, we’ll be taking a look at fish.
Sandra, Aiden’s mom and a professional chef, came to our class and made vegetable soup. That’s why we asked all the children to send in a vegetable. The children enthusiastically helped with all the dicing and chopping and many of them loved the soup. We now have a class book circulating about this experience. We acted out Stone Soup and The Gigantic Turnip. We tried to sing AikenDrum using only vegetables.
On another note, teacher professional day gave me the opportunity to check out my cool culture card, and I went to visit the Brooklyn Children’s museum - only about 30 minutes away by car. I thought that it was a fabulous opportunity for our children to have a fun filled learning experience. In addition to a separate play area for little children, the entire museum had exhibits that were accessible to children and covered a range of multicultural, and science and social study experiences. Of course my favorites were the pond life area and the pizza shop, but there was much more too! There have some “classes” for kids to participate in, but you need to check the schedule to find out about what’s being offered.
I urge you all to take advantage of your cool culture cards! Museums offer opportunity for children to widen their experience, and grow their language. They increase children’s knowledge of the world as they increase their vocabulary. The children’s museums are great, but even the more adult oriented museums offer a wide and wonderful range of experience for children although you may have to shorten your time periods at those museums to match your child’s attention span. Then please add a picture to our cool culture bulletin board so that families can know to talk to you about the experience.
Stay warm!
Minia, Lucy, Kirsty, Jan, Jean, and Yasmin
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