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  My posts are a bit late, because I have been in a constant state of busy since January. But I have to say that the month of April was super fun for me. We were working on Bees and Butterflies! I love this theme because we are able to order the butterflies and ladybugs from Amazon and watch them grow in our classroom. Our first project with this theme was to make bee hats. We LOVED our bee hats. I think they loved them because of the color of the paper. It was so bright and cheerful it’s just hard to not be happy with life when you are working with the lovely bright color of yellow. The way I expanded the lesson for the children with the bee hats, is by having us dance to the song Bumble bee buzz by the Laurie Berkner Band and singing the I Caught a little Baby Bumble Bee. We also pretended to be little bees who buzzed around the room and when scared we would pretend to sting who was next to us. This allowed me to help with the high energy going through the classroom that week and were able to learn about the different types of bees and the reasons that bees end up stinging people in the first place. The one thing I would have loved to do with the bee hats if I had remembered was to try to go on a Bee Hive Hunt. Which is basically me changing the words to the Bear Hunt to fit things the bee would do and going on a nature walk afterwards to look for flowers and bees. I like that we have the make and play activities in the Mother Goose Time curriculum. It allows the children to develop their imagination and have fun with what we are doing. The forget that they are learning new information and they just have fun with me and the rest of their class. I hope you enjoyed out Buzz buzz buzz on the Butterflies and Bees theme! Remember…… Live Long and Keep Teaching! Ms. Tessie Hi everyone, thank you for joining me today and welcome back to the blog! Conference week is always so crazy but I wanted to get Part 2 of the lessons I learned at NAEYC out to you as soon as I could. I did a video where I talk a bit more in depth about each of these if you want to watch it here: https://youtu.be/9zOookpBg2k
Otherwise here is a quick run-down of what I got from the second half of the conference! The talk I was most excited about this year was "Using Video Reflection to Support FCC Providers." I know a lot of you feel that educator conferences tend to leave us family child care homes out of the mix but this talk showed me that there are more and more programs out there that want to help us succeed. This talk focused on a program available in limited areas here in California where they record your day in order to help you develop more strategies to keep your classroom run more smoothly. Since we are on our own most of the time I found the technique to be something we can easily do on our own by just setting up our phones to record a few hours of our day (maybe our most difficult) so that we can review the situations more in-depth later. While this might not get us outside opinions it will allow us to focus on improving with a more clear mind when the kids all go home. Another discussion I attended was how to incorporate the arts into learning social skills. "Social Play through the Arts" explained really entertaining ways to get the kids working together through songs, games, and even theater skits. Watch my video https://youtu.be/9zOookpBg2k to hear the great activity they had us do as an example. The last lesson I really honed in on while at the conference was gathering tips on "How to Create a Safe and Engaging Classroom." This is something I will go more in depth on later but it helped me come up with some good ideas on how to make the equipment we have in the classroom more meaningful just by tidying up and re-arranging. Stay tuned for a whole other blog post dedicated to all those tips. Thanks again for dropping in and make sure you jump over to the video to hear more about the examples of these tips I picked up at the NAEYC conference. As always..... Live Long and Keep Teaching! Ms. Tessie What I learned as an FCC Provider at NAEYC 2019- Part2 Hi everyone! I want to jump right into today's blog post because I think it is such an amazing way to build up your preschool or homeschool library!
The Mother Goose Time Curriculum program I use comes with books that are great for the kids and an amazing way to begin building your library. This week I wanted to review one of my favorites to start off with..."Fox and the Last Piece of Pie." This book has a great message about FAIRNESS that really resonated with my kids in class. I made a video on this book you can check it out HERE. So this book starts out describing the Fox who has taken all the apples off the tree to make a pie, but some other animals want the apples but find they are all gone...so what do you do? This is a cute story about sharing and being fair when there is only one slice left. The pictures in the book are large and act as a great way for the kids to "picture walk" through the book on their own. I like to have the Mother Goose Time books set out during our individual library time because of how easily the kids can reinforce the story for themselves through these great pictures. Do you have a collection of the Mother Goose Time books? I would love to hear how you utilize them in your classroom. Comment below and we can share ideas. Get started on your collection by visiting www.MotherGooseTime.com and ordering your box today. And remember.... Live Long and Keep Teaching! Ms. Tessie Mother Goose Time Book Review - Fox and the Last Piece of Pie  Recently I attended the NAEYC conference here in California, and I wanted to share a few of the most important takeaways for an FCC provider. Please check out the video on Youtube for more information!
https://youtu.be/j023WovBGC0 I attended three talks on the first day of the conference:
I will be doing another blog post on the last two a different day but today I wanted to focus on the first half. Steam Coming Out Of My Ears was all about how to handle kids with strong emotions. While I didn’t get to stay the whole time (I was kicked out…eek! Watch my video to hear what happened) the concept of a “time-IN” vs a time out was the most intriguing. This is something I want to talk more about so comment below if you want me to do a separate blog post about how I implement that in my own classroom. The second talk I attended was ways to integrate STEAM into your classroom. I was so inspired by this talk, especially in these four areas:
So letting children fail might seem harsh to some, but it really is about letting the children discover problem-solving techniques on their own. One project that was recommended included seeing how many things the kids could put in small boats before they sink. You could use common household things like aluminum foil “boats” and things from the backyard, which leads us to the second point, you don’t need expensive kits to introduce STEM projects to your kids. I am a lover of these expensive kits don’t get me wrong, but we don’t need to constantly spend $20 or more to teach concepts that we can teach by reusing items from our homes. Saving jars can be a great way to start your own collection of STEM materials. If you have older kids, or your program allows, you can use coins to teach STEM and money concepts. Keep your eyes open around your home and you will see so many items that can be turned into STEM lessons for your kids! Now the third big inspiration was the idea of hosting a STEAM night for your families. Setting up different activity stations the children can walk their parents through is a great way to get your parents involved! This will be a fun way to inform their parents about what they are learning in your classroom. STORAGE! As providers sometimes we can be limited on space when it comes to our classrooms so where should you put all these great STEM items you are gathering? One way I thought of to adapt the concept of having individual carts for each area of STEM, was to have one cart with a rotating theme schedule. One day the cart could be filled with all things science, and the next day math. This is a great way to get the kids excited about centers too! Live Long and Keep Teaching! Ms Tessie  We are going on a safari! Hello and Happy New Year! This month has been so busy! My husband came home from deployment and I wanted to make sure I was fully here to help get him back into the swing of being back in the fold of the family. But that meant a ton of my projects were put to the side. So I am going to do a full overview of the month of January and going on a safari! This month the children started off with a grand adventure of learning about the continent of Africa. I am going to break this post up into the 4 themes of the month. It will give an overall clear picture of what we did and how we worked on it. Getting Ready for Safari For this theme we discussed the equipment needed for the safari. The two projects that the children were most interested in were the Passport and the packing list game. These two things are something these children have dealt with a ton in their short lives. They are military children and they have packed to move and travel basically since they were born. Playing a game that they could directly relate to their experience was super fun and tested their memories. They also loved the passport art project. But while they all have passports, they loved it because they were able to actually put stamps in them all by themselves. This gave them a sense of accomplishment.   (Pictures) Wild Safari Animals This weekly theme covered a few of the animals that live in the safari. This week while having interesting subjects was a little bit of a struggle for the kids. The art projects were not as engaging and seemed to require too much adult input. These types of projects seem to turn the children off and keep their interest less. They love projects where they have total control and build from top to bottom and a lot of these just were not doing that this month. But we did take the time to expand and learn about the animals more in-depth and watch the LION KING!!! The rhino horn was especially not an exciting project for them. But they did love making the lion mask and the zebra.  Life in the Grasslands
This was a fun week! We found recipes from Ghana that we want to try during snack or lunch one day. We watched a video on street food in Ghana and went over the fact that Africa is a continent and that there are other countries on the continent. We go over this every Tuesday for Geography Tuesday but it doesn’t hurt to go over the information again whenever the situation presents itself. I am proud to say that they all love to learn about places on the map. We do not go too in-depth because it’s a lot of information to take in. BUT I firmly believe that children should be exposed to many different types of experiences and information. It is the building blocks of other information. Until next time, Live long and Keep Teaching! Ms. Tessie |
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