Here is a great video that highlights the Importance of play.                     ...

I’ve been thinking about imaginary play and how as a young child my daughters would collect rocks, stones, seeds, cones, moss and sticks. Being fascinated by animals, they created mini animal habitats using these found objects. They would return to this play and over time created a whole world of rivers, towns and little people.  At school, we try to bring the outside in during our wintery rainy mornings. Little sticks, stones collected outside are transformed and when added to farm animals became a small farm. Turned over baskets and pebbles became a barn and moss became a mini forest. A glue gun and found objects can foster new directions with objects being transformed and integrated into their play. Found things easily become an amazing opportunity for kinders to connect nature with imaginative play. Our lives are busy but when you commit time and some props for imaginary play, your child is boosting his brain and increasing his learning skills. Open-ended play builds cognit...

--> http://childhood101.com/2009/12/the-case-for-not-packing-away/#comment-25225 I was blogging about play this morning and landed at a wonderful site about parenting, play and creative endeavours. The title was “The Case for NOT Packing Away!” This really reflects a philosophy about play with a sprinkling of understanding child development. The discussion really addressed the topic very well and is always a great discussion at our kindergarten meetings. I’m sure many of you have already figured out that our big projects in the block centre stay for days as kinders visit the creations to add on, change or re-invent. Jace and Sarah worked on a block project over many days adding, building and decorating. Lots of math was experienced through their play; symmetry, balance, space, one to one correspondence, counting ... --> Some of you might have experienced heartbroken resistance, when it comes time for your child to clean up that big project that he invested a grea...

Not too long ago, in my master’s class on child development we were challenged to write about our cherished memories of play as young children. Amazingly to us, but not surprising to our teacher, we had a common theme; unstructured, unsupervised and open-ended play. We shared common memories of playing outdoors for hours in multi-aged groupings in self-directed play. I remembered playing monkey in the middle with my siblings and neighbours, shooting pucks in the backyard rink that my dad made for us and hours of make believe play where of course my seven brothers dominated the game and indulged a little sister, assigning a minor role to me but inclusive. Today I have the most amazing job in the world. I am a Kindergarten teacher and my program is play-based. For the past few years I have lamented the loss of play in some of our primary classrooms, not because the institution has restricted play but because it is not trusted as important work. A friend recently a...

I have been working on the design of our kinder math e-portfolios. I am still fiddling with what should be included. I keep noticing their work and thinking we should add that to the portfolio. This week I added a slide on math literature since we read so many math books. Then I included a photo of the kinders reading from their personal folders since so many of the emergent books in their folds are math based. I also decided to include a slide on math stations since that is such a big part of their learning. However since I have not included that choice in conferences with the Kinders I don't have much data on that right now. Then, I was thinking on Friday that we should have some math celebrations which could be included like 100 Day or take photos of kids doing puzzles.  I'm getting really excited because the portfolios are beginning to show the growth of student knowledge while highlighting their own uniqueness. I believe that this project has the potential to trul...

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I am so excited to share the portfolios with my kinders on Monday. I decided to wait until Monday because we have a long stretch in the morning with no interruptions which will enable the kids to view their portfolios one at a time or I can leave it running during play centres. My biggest challenge this week with the portfolio project is finding time to conference with the students. I missed two days of school last week so I am behind in conferencing and have quite a pile of exemplars for the kids to choose their portfolio piece. We are lucky to have Miss Virgin our student teacher so that one of us can conference with a student while the other teaches. Hopefully I will get all caught up before she finishes her practicum on Friday. We are beginning our winter theme this week now that we have become experts on spiders. We haven't done too much creative art lately so this is a perfect theme for designing and building a winter village of little houses, roads, snow people, trees an...

Early Childhood Brain Insights  This is one of those must read blogs for parents and educators of children ages 0-7. We have heard so much about the importance of early learning experiences. This blog references recent brain research and blogs about early learning experiences. Enjoy!...

One benefit of our E-portfolio project is that the school district has given our school twenty Ipod touch for six weeks. This morning the kinders used the Ipod for the third time. I am amazed at how savy these four and five year olds are!!! They revisited favourite apps from last week and then explored a new app for short stories. They were sitting all around the classroom engrossed with the activity. Some were reading, others listening to audio stories and still others echo reading. It is so exciting as a teacher to have tools that motivate and engage learners. I wish I had taken pictures. Perhaps next time I will use an Ipod touch to take photos or even better make a video....

Our amazing staff are collaborating to create student e-portfolios this year. My hope is that this blog will become a part of the project and provide access for families to view the kindergarten e-portfolios and share my learning journey. The E-porfolio will reflect the student's work in one area only. Because my students love Math (as do I),  we will use this curriculum area for the e-portfolio....