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  Last month was about reviewing the alphabet. In an earlier posting I spoke about my class already knew their alphabet and their letter sounds. So I found a way to expand the lesson to make review month more fun. We did it by learning sign language. But there were other ways that I expanded the Mother Goose Time theme of the month. Mainly I used the resources for children I found on Youtube. Children need to be able to see what they are learning about. For example, if they have never seen snow, doing projects on snow is going to land a little flat. That does not mean you have to give up on teaching children about snow. You just have to get creative and use DAP (Developmentally Appropriate Practices ) to introduce concepts that they may have a hard time with. We learned about 26 different animals this month through youtube videos. Short videos that give the children an insight into the animal and can be conversation starters. The channels that I used: Freeschool Wild Kratts Sci Show Kids Some of the videos are a bit long, so we would only watch apart of them and have a summary talk afterwards. Another way that I expanded on lessons with the kids, was to use our loose parts in the classroom to help them develop an understanding of exactly what the animals live like. An example of this would be using blocks to build a dam like beavers. Pretending the Safari truck was taking baby bears to the zoo to be helped and needing to count the bears. The bear counters came with the theme box for the month.  We had a steam center set up in the classroom with nature items that were also used to learn about the different animals and habitats. Over all expanding lessons should really be about listening to the children in your classroom and following where their interests lie. We held races outside because we heard about how fast large cats run in the wild. We used the barn house in our block area to make our own zoo and pretended to camouflage to run away from predators.
Over all there are ways to make reviewing previously mastered areas fun and if you have any ideas or resources for expanding learning for your preschoolers please share them in the comments and remember..... Live Long and Keep Teaching Ms. Tessie |
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