ON THE ROAD AGAIN
We have started our roads study! Why investigate roads? Roads are all around us. Roads take us to school, to the store, and to visit family and friends. When riding in vehicles, children gaze out of the windows and watch the world go by. They delight in pointing out features on the road that, for adults, are simply part of the landscape: light poles, reflector bumps, overpasses, and bridges. In the classroom, roads become a key feature in the Block area, when children push toy cars from one building to another. A study of roads provides children with an opportunity to learn how roads are made, where roads take us, how we can stay safe on the road, and the features that make up a road. When children work together to create roads, they use a variety of skills to plan, write, draw, build, and negotiate with others.
Our focus question for the week was what do we know about roads? Here are our answers:
Scout - “they can have street lights”
Ben - “they have stop signs”
Dovie - “some are made out of cement”
Rhett - “some have red lights”
Natalie - “you drive your car on roads”
Katelyn - “there are bridges on some roads”
We have added many cars and a race track to our cars/block center. The children are enjoying building roads out of wooden blocks.
We colored, counted and graphed shape objects on ghosts!! They all did an awesome job on this activity. They are hanging up in the hallway…...check them out. Activities like this are helping them learn the verbal number sequence and one-to-one correspondence.
The children worked on geoboards and learned about spatial relationships and shapes. Understanding spatial relationships and shapes helps children build the foundation for understanding geometry. Children who have strong spatial sense do better in mathematics.
We played Boggle Junior this week. Why are we playing board games in PreK? Young children are learning all the time, and all types of “play” can give them opportunities to learn. Playing Boggle Junior gives them the opportunity to start to learn, practice and improve their letter and word recognition skills. The object of the game is to match letters on letter cubes with letters on picture/word cards; and race against the timer. Games like this are demonstrating positive approaches to learning. When children have a positive approach to learning, they are likely to want to learn more.
