brought to you by the friday morning class:
these are cloud shaped posterboard pieces that each child lined in cottonballs after sharing their dream. we listened to parts of dr. king’s “i have a dream” speech and then asked the childen what they wish for.
i bought dr. king’s “i have a dream” speech on itunes to use at preschool. i had several photographs of dr. king to show as a slideshow while we listened. we turned off the lights and got quiet. it is a rare occasion to have screen time in preschool, but worth it. i located the places of his speech where he speaks directly about children, first his own then his dream for all children.
one little girl piped up: hey! he’s talking about us!
oh yes he is.
with hundreds of tiny photographs of dr. king, preschoolers covered a capital M. First was the work of making a capital M shape with four strips of paper (how clever that it first looked like a lowercase L, then an upside down V, then a crooked capital N, then finally a capital M!).
then choosing and gluing dr. king all over the M. there were three different poses and most children were very specific in which they choose…the smiling one, the thinking one and the listening one (descriptions determined by the TTH class).
heard:
“martin looks almost exactly like me” (said by a blond, blue eyed girl
“martin has every part of the face like me…except for the moustache”
“martin smiled even though there was so much to be sad about”
“i am making martin have a sad face because i am sad for him”
we made collage faces of martin luther king jr. using the paper from last week (which was a combination of every skin tone paint) as the face, we looked at photographs of dr. king and added the appropriate features.
perhaps the most fun part for the kids was giving him a haircut. we glued the face on a square of paper, then trimmed away!
preschool families and friends have been collecting milk lids for us.
thank you!
since it is m week we’ve been sorting by color. we’ve noticed that in the tens of milk lids there are, there is only one brown lid. come on, let’s drink some chocolate milk!
the next phase of this activity is arranging them into words, letter groups, abc order, etc. for some of our kids we explored spacing between letters. learning that when there is a “finger space” between letters that means they are different words. sometimes it was fun to do that on purpose. like a joke. hee hee hee.
we noticed how many letters can become other letters simply by turning them.
kevin can become keviz and can easily become kevin again! more funny stuff.
keep bringing those milk lids…we have more projects in mind!
we played a version of simon says using left and right commands. oh, but how to remember which is our left? which is our right? especially when ms. kristin is standing in front of you and she is a mirror image? or when she turns around to stand like you so you turn around too? what do we do?
we put on wristbands from the thrift shop. since it was l week, we put them on our left hand. very handy.
the concept of left and right is one that we may not see the grasping of during preschool. it is a common phrase among preschool educators to refer to “your other left” or “your other right” because many young children simply haven’t mastered it!
we did some finger painting one day in preparation for a martin luther king jr project and made handprints of each set of hands. we referred to their hands as left and right as we did it and wrote the words for them.
