The Learning Bin

A teacher is never really on vacation, because even when I'm playing Legos with my nephew we're having a learning experience. While eating a morning snack last week we watched a YouTube video shot by a drone of a flooded stone quarry. We could see abandoned vehicles under the surface of the water. Today H recreated an abandoned under water vehicle scene in the living room.

It’s teacher appreciation week and I urge everyone to really take a minute to think about your child’s teacher.   What do you know about them?   What do your kids know about them?   Some of my best and most useful gifts have come from families who really knew something about me. **Please note, I’m not saying gifts are a must, just saying for those of you that do show appreciation in this way, make the present fit the person.** Top Teacher Gifts that I have received in my decade of teaching: A brightly patterned orange backpack. (My favourite colour is orange, which the children all know from color lessons. I also travel a lot so a nice carry on sized backpack is a great thing to have.   I’ve used this gift 100s of times). Acute teacup with an assortment of tea. (I drink tea every morning, and throughout most of my parent teacher conferences…I used this gift and enjoyed it.)   A travel mug and Starbuck card (Same as above with the tea, an...

This morning we used three of our senses to figure out what "A" and "B" cups contained. We used our eyes to observe that both cups had white crystals. We use our fingers to feel that both cups held things that felt rough. The big differences came when we tasted. One was salty and one was sweet. Based on all of our observations we identified the substances as sugar and salt. To finish up our discussion we named different salty or sweet snacks and talked about how different people like different tastes.

A big shout out to the art teacher at my school who has been working with my kiddos once a week to create amazing visuals. This is a self portrait series that highlights emotions, can you guess what they are?

This year for the PTO fund raiser I made a giant mural/collage with the class.  We brain stormed everything that was in our community, and each cut out and decorated homes and buildings to add into the piece.  Once it was compiled and stuck down to a large cardboard sheet with glue, the teaching team mod-podge painted over the entire thing 3 times to get the seal and coverage we needed for it to survive in our humid climate. I especially like the swimming pool with the diver! This piece now resided outside the main door of the early childhood centre at our school.

This year for Halloween I had both families who were avid celebrators of the holiday, and those who did not celebrate it at all.  To find a nice compromise we did a book study of "Room on the Broom" written by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Axel Sheffler. I wrapped the idea around friendship and kindness rather than Halloween and everyone was happy. To make the bulletin board I used the fairy tale printable boarder from Sparkle Box UK, http://resources.sparklebox.me.uk/7000-8000/sb7597.pdf Then I layered construction paper to make the broom and took pictures of the students, teacher, and aides all sitting sideways on a chair against a blank background.  The children asked to add in the animals so I simply copied their pictures from our copy of the book. There are so many wonderful resources for this story and I can't speak more highly of the short film that was made in 2012, it is wonderful!

The b bells were not as successful as I had hoped.  The transposition of the letter happened for most of the children in the class, and the idea of a ringing bell wasn't something that was part of their reality.  For next time around I'm thinking of doing a /b/ with bat wings.

There was a great deal of excitement about my birthday in the classroom, so I promised the class a treat. First we observed 3 different cookies: Then we made notes on our observations. After that we tasted and picked our favorites: The three flavored in order were: 1. Molasses buckwheat 2. Oatmeal strawberry 3. Carmel chocolate chip And with a tie breaking vote from the principal the grand winner is the molasses buckwheat!

This year the learning standards for my PK class include both upper and lower case letter identification.  Usually in the past I have focused on one or the other depending on if I was teacher Handwriting Without Tears or Jolly Phonics.  So after the success of the upper case letter collages, I began our fourth spiral of the alphabet with lower case letters.  For reference sake the first spiral was using the Starfall curriculum and their web resources (starfall.com), the second spiral was the upper case alphabet collage book, the third pass was working on our upper case letter writing using the Handwriting Without Tears curriculum, and now enter our fourth spiral: 

What would the world be like without beauty such as this? Think twice before using products with palm oil in them, because places like this are disappearing in favor of palm plantations. Stop buying these products and the cutting of jungle will not be profitable. Location: Tesso Nilo National Park, Sumatra Indonesia

If you are patient and thoughtful, the small and beautiful bits of our world will take notice.

Rounding out our alphabet and our animal unit with Z Zebras! The class has done a beautiful job with the upper case alphabet. Next we're moving on to the lower case letters. A note on academic impact: after doing these art collages the class has near 100% mastery on naming upper case letters. Only one child continues to need support with upper case letter. Success!

What could be more fun than Yak horns? This fit it wonderfully with our animal unit and we learned some fun fact about yaks. The kiddos were most intrigued by the idea of drinking yak's milk, but unfortunately we don't live in a place where we could get any!

My dye cut machine X wouldn't fit very well on the kiddos own hands, but they got a big kick out of making an X-Ray from my hand. Note for lower case x, you could have the kids draw an outline of their own hand and add the x for bones.

We have watermelon year round here in Sumatra. Snack bags often have red or yellow watermelon in them, and it is a favorite snack of the kiddos. Here are our yummy W Watermelons!

We could just as easily have done V Valentines, but the vase came out nicely too. I might try and use ribbon or paper strips to create the stems next year, that way it will be more clear that the V is the container for the flowers. Don't forget the complete set of black line masters for A-Z are available at my store, just follow this link: Http:www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Alphabet-Collage-Book-Upper-Case-1535454

We snuck our U Umbrellas in right towards the end of rainy season. I expected more decorative elements to be added to the umbrellas, but perhaps the kiddos were just burnt out of rain.

In my experience most teachers have embraced their inner nerd. I certainly have! One of my current school's core values is to be a life long learner. We've been exploring the core values during morning assembly and it got my wheels spinning. Of course I'm a life long learner, just look at my iPod play list! As a professional educator I read several early childhood publications, and follow several educational forums and iTunes U segments. But I consider that to be a basic level of professionalism, it doesn't reach too deeply into the essence of nerd. My husband and I run or go for walks almost every evening after dinner, and during this time we listen to podcasts. Each of us in our own worlds of specific interests, happy to observe nature and listen to different topics of interest. So my top, most favoured podcasts in no particular order are: The First World War in 261 weeks Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine Mike and Tom Eat Snacks Dan Carlin'...

I was worried that T Tables would be boring, but instead every table was ladened with celebratory foods. I suppose that given the blank slate, imaginations run wild.

Snakes are a regular occurrence here in the jungle. We see snakes slither across our outdoor hallway with some frequency, so the kiddos have a personal connection to them. This was reflected in lots of patterns, smiles, and familiarity.

The kiddos chose what they would like to decorate our screen wall with and a nautical theme won. Kelley fish and beta fish now grace our outdoor wall. The wind moves the plastic strips so nicely. The space has become so much more colorful and fun, hooray reusing!!

Today we began an exploration of plastic bags. Our class goal this week is to create art work that can be places outside without falling apart when it rains. We will use strips of plastic bags to create different animal sculptures and representations to hang on our screen wall in the science and biology space in PK. More pictures to come, but here is a peek at our exploration.

For nearly all my life my schedule has revolved around a school year. In the past I looked upon New Year's Day as a fresh beginning. But as time passed I realized I was much more committed to a fresh start happening in August. Now I call them my "new school year resolutions" and find myself accomplishing goals that would likely fizzle out if I began them in January. In August of 2014 I made the resolution to live debt free. This is a huge goal for a normal couple in our early 30s, complete with some credit card debt and a sizable chunk of student loans. I began by making a monthly breakdown that included the amount I would need to pay for each debt point to pay off the total plus interest amount in 12 months. As late summer moved into early fall I found that I was able to pay twice as much as I had estimated. I credit our frugal lifestyle for this boon. We're also working really hard to get into good shape so our soda and Doritos money is going toward the pay off. Bri...

When I take the "long" way to work I pass by this impenetrable wall of green leaves. Each leaf is between 12 inches and 3 feet long. Everyday I wonder, what might live behind this wall of green? I'm planning on using this image as a writing prompt for part of our jungle unit.

We had a little trouble with transposed Rs this time around, but the rainbow theme spawned two days of rainbows, unicorns, and dragons in the painting and art areas. Imagination is a wonderful thing!

Explaining a quilt to a group of kids who live in an equatorial jungle is trickier than it seems. I brought in a quilt from my house left over from chilly Michigan and Ontario winters and the kiddos snuggled up in it for Tommy dePaola's The Quilt Story. They especially liked the soft boarder, so we added a ruffled on to our collages.