A simple recipe for amazing preschool success with your little ones

What does it take to make an outstanding recipe - whether the traditional kind for food, or a recipe for something much less tangible, like success?

I would argue that all recipes need ingredients, and better ingredients will usually yield better results. Of course, there has to be a method for putting those ingredients together, and surely almost every recipe needs to be carefully seasoned. 

 

My ingredients for preschool - beside the obvious preschoolers and adult carer - would have to start with books and music!  So it was this last week, when we focused on learning the letter J.

One of the wonderful things about children is their energy, and rather than fight it, I figured we'd expend some of it by dancing and singing. We exercised to 100 with Jack Hartman's Count to 100, and did the Tooty Ta with Dr. Jean - because no kid can resist sticking out their tongue and bottom while they dance (who can)?! We sang Hello My Name Is Joe, adding actions until we could barely stand, and worked on vocal modulation sang loudly and quietly with John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt while jingling our bells. Were the kids worn out? NO! Were the teachers? Yes, yes we were, but it was only 9:30 am so we kept going.

Do you see the huge pile of jewelry in the box shown above? We put it ALL on and JUMPED JOYFULLY in jewelry.  By the time we were done the kiddos were ready to sit down for a few books (and my exercise ring was closed for the day)! 

Jump Frog, Jump is a great book for an energetic group - the pages alternate between story line and exclaiming "Jump Frog, Jump!" We held our bodies still on the story pages, just waiting to explode our arms up into the air as we shouted at the frog to JUMP! (Little ones can't still for very long, but by alternating still and moving we're working on self control.)

After our stories were done we worked our fine motor muscles gluing jewels onto a letter j.  I had fine plans for making a jack-o-lantern uppercase J another day, but... some days you follow the recipe, and other days you improvise. It's all good!

This week we'll be focusing on letter K.  My music playlist includes Katalina Matalina, Old King Cole, Kookaburra, and Polly Put the Kettle On.  We'll be reading about kangaroos and koalas, making a letter K craft with a kangaroo and song, and crafting adorable koala headbands.

K is also for kittens, kisses and Kente Cloth, and we'll read about them all. We'll reach into my letter K box to find a king, keys, koala, KitKat and chocolate kisses. I have a karate outfit that the kiddos will take turns wearing, and we'll look for chocolate kisses hidden in the toy kitchen. In case that isn't enough, I'm super excited to have downloaded all the alphabet songs from HeidiSongs, so we'll be singing and dancing lots of letters!

If we go back to the recipe metaphor, I'll finish by adding a helping dollop of outside time and free play, and seasoning liberally with joy and love.  I'm pretty sure our recipe is going to be amazing!

Kente Colors, art and math learning

Have you met the beautiful book, Kente Colors, by Debbi Chocolate?

 The illustrations by John Ward are a gorgeous accompaniment to the rhyming text about the meaning of different colors in the West African cloth.  There is even an author's note explaining a little bit of the history of Kente, which is just right for young listeners.

Years ago, when I taught first grade, I used this book as the starting point for a combined math and art lesson - which I thought I'd share with you today.

We started by reading the book and the author's note, and it is also very easy now to use YouTube.com to show students video of traditional Ghanian artists creating kente.  I like this link and this link.  We also reread the book, noticing the designs in the kente, which are inorganic, geometric shapes, in complex patterns.  Do you see the math lesson hidden in this gem?

Next the children chose paper in several colors, each of which has a special meaning.  I found a table showing the meaning of each color here.  I cut my paper into 4" wide strips - because traditional kente is woven in long strips 4 inches wide, then sewn together into pieces of cloth.  Making narrow strips also makes it easier for students to repeat the patterns, it seems to be a more manageable size.  You can see on the photo above that I've drawn a zigzag line on one of the strips, and have several colors that I'll cut all at once.  I also made 4 or 6 of each element, so I could create a repeating pattern on two strips of paper.

It can be difficult for young kiddos to make multiple pieces the same - so here's my trick.  I have the students fold the paper, and I staple the end together, as you can see above.  They can then draw one shape on the piece of paper, cut through all the layers without the papers slipping around, and end up with 4 copies of their shape.  If you need a little more detail, I wrote a blog post explaining this step by step.

Here I've cut out multiple pieces so I can layer them for my pattern.

Have your students lay the pieces out on their strips of background paper - they can move them around until they are happy with the design, and then glue them down.  (You might want to keep the glue back until students show you that they've created a repeating pattern, so they don't glue down something that isn't a pattern.)

If  you like, you can have students make another set of kente inspired pattern strips, and then alternate them with the first pattern - creating an even more complex pattern of patterns!

This artwork makes a fantastic display, and an excellent opportunity to discuss shapes and patterns, with an art history lesson too.  My students enjoyed this project - I hope yours do too!