Juniors Update: "What's in the Sock"?

Hello everyone,

It was so nice to be back together as a group after a long Spring Break!  We started the day with a new activity called "What's in the Sock?", where we began our lessons on “inferencing” by using our senses. The children touched the sock to inform their guess of what was inside the sock.  This is one of 5 initial activities we will do to work on making inferences before we begin making inferences with facial expressions and in social interactions, which are more sophisticated and complicated.

The children enjoyed this activity, but had a hard time with it.  Some of the children guessed the glue bottle inside the sock was a hand sanitizer or something smooth. These were close guesses!

After our game we had a quick meeting to review the schedule and make some play plans for hang out time.

Next up... during hang out time we made more specific play plans while we used the Playmobil toys to make sure that everyone was on the same page.  We ended up having collaborative sword fights and horse races.

We also did some water-color paintings, which are the beginning of a larger year-end project we will be working on for the next few weeks.

Slamwich is a game we played in pairs today that the children enjoyed learning and playing!

After hang-out we had a puppet show to introduce our newest have-to: keep the chain going.  We acted out some conversations where the participants stayed on topic, and then when they didn't.  We decided it was better when the puppets stayed on topic, or "made connections and chains."  We then added our own "chains" to a conversation chain.  When someone said something off-topic, it made a separate chain and we were all confused.  We will be using this new have-to as a prompt to keep the children on topic during conversations and play.

We practiced this new have-to by using straws and connectors.  We started by giving the children 5 minutes to build independently and then they connected their structures with a peer.  We all decided it was more fun when we made connections!

It was a great day back and we look forward to the new curriculum, play and creating we have coming for the next few weeks!  Just a reminder, we will have program on Wednesday, April 27th during the public school Spring Break.  Also, the last day of program is going to be May 25th.

Thanks everyone, we'll see you next Wednesday!