During these past two weeks we have been singing various songs related to the Little Farmers project. Most of the children have learnt the lyrics to these songs and enjoy singing them during our morning circle time.
In this blog post, I am attaching links to two farm songs which the children love and which they enjoying singing. Feel free to go into these links and be directed to a safe mode view of these songs which the children can play over and over again without a worry!
I believe that home-school communication is very important and it is vital to have. Involving you parents does not only make the journey of your child more interesting and fun but it directly involves you in the learning and the growth of your little ones. Through this blog, I am creating a link between home and school where I can share things we do in class that you can build on at home yourselves. If you want to get to know more about parental involvement and the importance of home-school communication, here’s a link to an interesting website discussing further the importance of a link between the home and the school.
http://www.readingrockets.org/article/getting-parents-involved-schools
Generated from the children’s interests, the Little Farmers project exposed the children to a whole new world. The little ones discovered different aspects of farm and farming which they had never heard about before.
The children are enjoying this project a lot and they have showed genuine interest to the activities we are carrying out together. Despite this great interest, the majority of the children have never been on a farm and so I have uploaded this educational video that you as parents can watch with the children at home.
This video will give the children a farm field trip and what to expect when one goes on a farm. It is very educational, especially for the ones who have never seen a farm before and does not know how it looks like. From this video, the little ones will also discover different farm animals and their products!
Hope you’ll enjoy this!
During our Little Farmers project, the children had the opportunity to play various games related to farm and farm animals. In this post, I have attached various educational games related to the project which you can play with your little ones at home. These games do not only encourage recognition of different farm animals and their sounds but they also give the children an opportunity to count and learn new things.
You can play and explore these games by clicking on the photos and they will direct you to the websites!
Hope you enjoy them as much as we did in class!
Create an Animal Farm game
Animals on the Farm game
Cow Munch
The emergent curriculum is a new approach in which the children’s interests are put as priority and are observed so that a project is generated from them. After conducting my observations in the first week of Teaching Practice, the children’s interests have come out with a project on farms and farming. Together we decided to name our project the Little Farmers project.
In our first morning circle time, the children and I had a discussion in which we created a web full of ideas related to farms and farming. The children were also encouraged to talk about what they know about farms and what do they want to know about them. The last column of the K.W.L chart is being filled throughout the project, documenting what the children are learning from the activities we are doing.
Today, the little ones had an opportunity to visit a very child-friendly place. Arriving at this restaurant after quite a long bus ride, the children were warmly welcomed by very friendly staff members. After the children settled on the large table prepared for them, they were encouraged to go and play in the large indoors supervised play area. This was not only fun for the children but it also enhanced the children’s gross motor skills when they jumped, climbed and did other movements as they went down the slides, climbed ladders and passed through tubes.
After enjoying this free time, the little ones were given the opportunity to use their little hands create their own pizzas. Each child was offered with a rolling pin to open the small piece of dough in the shape of a pizza base. This encouraged the children to use their fine motor skills. The little ones were then offered a spoon and red sauce to spread on the pizza base and mozzarella to put on top of it. Different ingredients were then put on the table for the children to choose and put as toppings to their pizzas. Once the pizzas were baked in the oven, the children ate the pizza they created themselves.
In this outing, the children were given the opportunity to not only enhance the development of their fine and gross motor skills but to gain knowledge of how a pizza is done and the different ingredients used. It was an educational outing which the children enjoyed!
What children learn does not follow as an automatic result from what is taught, rather, it is in large part due to the children’s own doing, as a consequence of their activities and our resources.
—Loris Malaguzzi, The Hundred Languages of Children
As a kindergarten educator, I am learning to adopt a new approach through which children learn. This approach is very hands on and child-initiated, making children active participants in their learning. As a student teacher, I am myself still learning about this approach and am going to adopt it throughout my Teaching Practice.
The video I am uploading in this blog post features teachers and parents who talk about this very unique approach toward curriculum, and how a child’s very own interests become the launch pad for curiosity… and a lifetime love of learning.
If you are more into reading, here’s a link to a very interesting article which talks about the emergent curriculum and its importance.
https://www.naeyc.org/resources/pubs/yc/nov2015/emergent-curriculum
Little Hands 