Hectic

That's what this week has been, to say the least. Doubling up is kicking my ass a small bit. This is the first chance I've had to actually sit down and update this, nevermind all the other things I should have gotten done this week that I've let slide. Anyways, here we go.

Sunday morning I still wasn't sure what exactly I wanted to do with the year ones. I introduced them to expressing themselves through the art elements last week, and wanted to continue along those lines, but I also had four classes that needed to finish their crabs, as we missed Tuesday and Thursday before the Eid vacation. So I decided to catch them up, and do an extension of the next art element - line - with the two classes that already finished their crabs. Thoughts on the line lesson: Went well. The kids are getting better at following directions and not getting paint on themselves. Made a nice addition to the sponge prints - now it looks like a finished product, rather than just an experiment. On the extension: well, it reinforced the different kinds of line and gave them something fun and easy to do for a period, and something to do the next time they finish early.

Year Twos are doing experimental sculptures this week. I was going to do it station style, but I forgot to find the balloons I wanted to use, so I scratched that idea. We only had time for three experiments: clay, paper, and ice cubes (which was tricky to work with, but the kids thought it was pretty cool, no pun intended).

KG2's are making rainbows this week. They are learning about plants and "mini-beasts" this unit, so we will be using the rainbows to make flowers in a later lesson. Watered down PVA glue and had them paint it onto segments of paper, then gluing pink, yellow, and blue tissue papers to the segments to create the colors. Right now my biggest problem is that they have some difficulty placing the tissue precisely, but this is something that will come as their fine motor skills progress. Still working out how to put the flowers together - I was going to do 6 petals and talk about complementary colors, but I think the flowers will look better if I have them chop it in half and make 12 petals.

Had a goal-setting conference with Stephanie this morning, and I guess that went well enough. She was concerned that my goals didn't have much to do with working in a new curriculum, and I agree - but it's such a big thing that I wasn't sure where to start. She also encouraged me to get into the classrooms with the teachers more and do more observations, that it will help me to become more fully integrated with them, so that's what I'm going to do...not sure how much I'll get to do it for a while, since I've still got KGs on top of my year twos and doubled ones til the end of January, and I've got reports to do in the time before then (OH, how much have I loved reports? How much do I love reports? How much will I always love reports?) but I'll do it anyways, because it's good for me.