This week on our family unit, we have continued to listen to international/traditional music in our classroom. We were able to listen to Dutch, Polish and Spanish nursery songs. We had quite a few dancers, and although they did not understand the language, they knew it was music they could dance to. We'd like to give credit and say thank you to Soeske (Eloise mom) for giving us the name of the nursery song from the Netherlands. It was great to see Eloise and Isabelle's reactions!
We also worked on family portraits. We took a photo from our family wall, showed it to each child one by one, and had them "draw" members of their family on a cardboard. Although we saw squiggly lines, circled shapes, and many dots, we could see there was intent in their drawing. This will be an ongoing project that will approximately continue until next week.
Because the children were interested in painting, we let them use the table and their bare hands. No paper! (No shirts or pants either) We added shaving cream on top to give it a softer squishier feel and let them have at it. They truly enjoyed getting messy.
We also took out air dry clay and used the pine branches to create different shapes with. The children were really engaged, with the activity lasting 20 minutes. Some were poking holes on their clay and others were lining up their little pine leaves one by one next to each other.
