A Bowl of Little Words

One effective strategy to improve Reading Fluency is 'sounding out words'. The child says each sound in a word and then say the word. One of best ways to start practicing the 'sounding out' strategy is by using CVC (Consonant Vowel Consonant) or three letter words. There are many ways to present CVC words to the students, being flashcards the classic one. However I created the "Bowl of Little Words" and the students were very motivated to use it. To make this game I used glass pebbles and pictures cut out from a phonics workbook answer key.





. This post is also at http://demelloteaching.wordpress.com/2014/06/11/reading-fluency-effective-strategy/

Wood Artwork Inspired by Karel Appel

Karel Appel is a fantastic Dutch artist. I came across his work when researching about Dutch artists as I had Dutch students in my class. I was doing an art unit and wanted every student to see the work of at least four different artists of their nationality. I had 12 different nationalities represented in my class and that was fascinating. Well, it was an international school after all. I was lucky that the art teacher already had lots (really a lot) of prints of most of the artists. Some were just postcards that the teacher had from her own collection. Now guess what I buy when I go to an art museum?

This post is also at my new blog http://demelloteaching.wordpress.com/2014/06/11/wood-artwork-inspired-by-karel-appel/

Colored sticks on Cardboard

Young children love to do collage and a great medium is just a bunch of colored sticks and colorful cardboard. 
As a provocation you can leave colored paper, colored sticks, and glue on a table, as an invitation for them to explore the materials and create artwork.
This is a good provocation for units related to art appreciation / role of art in our lives / how we can express ourselves.

Shape Friends

One of the activities I like to do about shapes is to ask my students if they can represent themselves with shapes. They are invited to reflect upon shapes in our bodies and after we decided which shapes we would use they create a ‘shape friend’ using pre-cut colored shapes. The students can create their ‘shape friend’ any way they want. After we discuss which shapes are in the human body I pre-cut the shapes as they are 3 and 4 years old and cutting is not my goal for this learning experience. Hands can be squares, triangles, or circles, bodies can be rectangles or triangles, they can use yarn or shredded paper for hair and so on. The folded rectangles for legs was my suggestions as the students previously showed interest in folding strips of paper. 

Painting with Cups

Another fun project we did this year was painting using cups.

I initially asked what were cups for. Nobody guessed it was for painting and then I asked if we could use cups to paint. The answers were varied and one student said we could do like stamps.

Brown Bear Brown Bear read by children

'Brown Bear Brown Bear, What Do You See?' is a popular reading in PreK and KG classes. The book is by Bill Martin Jr. with pictures by Eric Carl. It is magical, beautiful, musical, catchy, and you can read it, sing it and act it out. First and second graders can also get inspired by the book and do a variety of activities including writing their own book using the same format of Brown Bear Brown Bear.

In my PreK class I used this book during Shared Reading and we ended up doing a read along of it. I posted in youtube as there are no visuals of the children just their voices and it is a read along version.

I began using Garage Band but could not get pass the 'sharing the file' stage so I ended up using iMovie as I am more familiar with the program and the file is saved on an m4v format, which is one of the formats Youtube allows for uploads. I also uploaded on Vimeo.

Click on the picture to watch it on Youtube.

You can also watch it on vimeo below.

Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do You See from Amelia Mello on Vimeo.

The children were so into it! Congratulations EC readers! 

Painting with Spools

In exploring the classroom to find unusual painting tools we decided to try 'spools' that are part of the 'Laces and Beads' box. We found out that they make interesting prints.

Inspired by Georgia O'Keefe

Sometimes it takes one good tip from another teacher to change our way of presenting a project to our students. In reading the post from Sally's fabulous blog "Fairy Dust Teaching" about Georgia O'Keefe I solved a problem on how to present the 'poppies' project to my students. I never knew how to emphasize that the flowers Georgia painted were BIG. Big for preschoolers can be relative. Then I read in Sally's post that Georgia painted the flowers so big that they would reach the edges of the paper. Those were the magic words i needed! Thanks Sally!