Dramatic Play Centre... The Bird Zone

We are still in birds for our inquiry so here is a glimpse at our dramatic play centre. It is ALWAYS a work in progress but this is where we are right now. Mrs. K and I built the corner tree on a PA day and the pictures in the area are of birds the kids can recognize from our bird feeder. On our shelves are some bird stuffed animals, puppets, a bin of sticks, a bin of rocks, a bin of pine cones, a sensory bucket filled with sunflower seeds and of course our window is incorporated too. There are 2 stools (one for each window in the centre) and there are bird posters under the window too. They can look outside at our window feeder or hanging feeder and hope to catch a glimpse of a bird. 

I just bought this carpet last weekend from Ikea. It was on $29.00 not a bad price at all. It really inspired them in the centre and made it feel more outdoorsy as they crossed the river or tried to swim. I am very happy with my purchase. 

Finally, I wanted to draw your eyes to our bird board. These are the 9 birds that the children know all from watching the bird feeder at www.feederwatch.org. I found some nice crisp photos of them online and had them printed out. Then the children wrote out the names below the birds. There is definitely a reflection of our children's voices in this classroom. I am very proud of that!

Just in case you were wondering, here are the birds we know:

1) Evening Grosbeak

2) Chickadee

3) Black crowned sparrow

4) Downy Woodpecker

5) European Starling

6) Blue Jay

7) Ruffed Grouse

8) Pine Grosbeak

9) Grey Jay

Focus on writing

We have focused a lot on writing for the past month and a bit. We started wonderful writing every single day at period 2. The children have filled their folders with vivid pictures and some beautiful new sentences. Their folders were starting to get a little crowded so we decided to pull out all the finished January writing, and send it home. I made a cover page for them and evaluated all the writing so the parents can see what stage of writing their child is at.

Mrs. K discovered this neat idea on a kindergarten facebook page. Instead of the traditional calendar (that both of us were pretty bad at updating) we put together this bristol board calendar (thanks to our highschool student getting those volunteer hours!!! Didn't she do an AMAZING job!) The children wrote the word february to make the border of our calendar and then whenever they have something special coming up they can write it on our calendar. The children have contributed things like "Pizza Day", "Swimming", "Skating", birthdays etc. It makes them excited to write, eager to share and it personalizes our calendar into a much more meaningful classroom tool.

Last but not least for this focus on writing, we changed the way our children sign in in the morning. With our new focus on writing, we decided it was time to do away with the children finding their names on their paper and placing them in the basket. Now it was their turn to "sign in". So every morning they come into our classroom and find this waiting for them on the table with a bin of markers! That's right... Markers! How fun. They write their name on the lines to tell us they are here and ready to learn. They are having a lot of fun policing it and making sure their friends remember to sign in.

Stop Light to Behaviour

 I wanted to share the stop light system we use in our classroom. We started with the traditional Red Light, Yellow Light, Green light at the beginning of the year. We also chose to put our stop light upside down so children understood that moving up is good, moving down is bad. It was a very basic model with just coloured circles. It worked well but Mrs. K and I both agreed that we needed to support and celebrate our students who go above and beyond just as much as we need to encourage those students who need reminders to make better choices. So I hunted pinterest and combined a few different ideas to come up with this one:

All of the students have a clothes peg with their name on it on both sides. They all start their day on green because they are all "ready to learn". We give reminders throughout the day of what that looks like (sitting criss cross, quiet, eyes forward, listening, doing our jobs etc.). Children get a warning first and then their peg is moved down. At this stage children are also reminded to tell us what yellow means. They always say "think about it" and we encourage them to think about the choices they made that got them there. We usually end our conversations with "Can you get back up to green? YES! How can we do that?" If we have to intervene again, then the child gets moved to red. Again, we keep things on a more positive note by calling it "Make better choices" and we talk about what those choices could be. Our goal is to get those kids to green.

On the positive side of our chart children can be moved up to blue (great choices) and purple (star student). These are just above and beyond things like helping out a friend, great problem solving skills, great cleaning, etc.

At the end of the day we give out stickers to the children on Green, Blue, and Purple.

I picked up this cute little drawer unit at walmart. It holds our stickers perfectly. There is even a spot at the top for our work stickers, stars and jewel stickers.

In the top drawer are our stickers for the children on Green. They get wonderful stickers but tiny little guys. 

In the middle drawer we keep our blue stickers. These are bigger stickers or cooler stickers. At first we let the children on blue or purple choose their own stickers but that got too time consuming so now we choose the sheet for the day but they choose the sticker they want off of that sheet. 

In the bottom drawer are our stickers for the children on Purple. These stickers are our fancy stickers. They are big, or fuzzy, or smelly.

 I also bout a sheet of sticky back little jewels from dollarama and the children on Purple get to choose a jewel to put on their clothespeg. Once their clothespeg is full then they will get to take it home and we will get them a new one.

This behaviour chart has worked so well in our class!

Recess Pets - fixing outdoor behaviour problems

We were having some issue in our kinder room at recess time. They were being very hands on and strugging to remember how to walk in a line. Too many sillies! So I came up with these "Recess Pets". They were just clothespegs with pompoms glued on and googly eyes:

The children were introduced to these pets one day and given a very important task. Their job was to care for these pets. They only came out at recess time and they cared for them by making good choices. Helping friends, using words etc. They lost their pets by being hands on, not coming when the bell goes, making poor choices etc. The children then got to choose a pet and we wrote their name on the back of them. At first recess the pets were clipped to their coats and out we went. If their were any problems outside, the children got a warning first and then their pet was removed. Back inside, the children who kept their pets safe were given a green box for the recess:

Everytime their pet came in safe, they got another day coloured in. Once the children had 5 squares coloured in they got a prize. At the end of the day all of the pets were returned to the leash for the night.

Prizes didn't cost us anything either. We had this book called "Treasure chest" it was just a small scrapbook album I had at home:

 Inside, I cut 8X8 paper down to the books size and taped in little prize cards:

Here is the list of prizes we used:
Bring a stuffed toy to school
Get first choice of outdoor toy
Show and Tell
Have a good note sent home
Read a book to the class
Play a game with the teacher
Use special stickers in the art centre (very popular with the girls)
Sit in a special chair at the carpet
Be in charge of sweeping floors (believe it or not but there was constant arguing over sweeping and washing tables at lunch time)
Be in charge of washing tables
Switch spots at lunch
Get a drink from the water fountain whenever you want (the child got a badge to wear as their "pass")
Carpet captain for the day
Line leader for the day (Both carpet captain and line leader prizes included a badge that they wore to state that they were carpet captain (make sure the children are quiet and criss-cross) and line leader (first in line all the time))
Use playdough at freetime
Sit beside a friend at lunch
Have lunch at the teachers desk (This was the MOST popular prize!!! They LOVED this one)
Have a turn in the rocking chair
Computer turn

Introducing the pet routine
When we started the recess pets, the pets were given out every recess and collected every recess. Once they got used to the pet routine, we gave them out at first recess and collected them at the end of the day.

Things I would do differently
I would add pictures to the prize book so it would be more independent for them to choose. They are still learning to read so they needed some help reading all the prizes.

Graphing is for the birds

We have been doing graphing for a bit now and are still into birds on our virtual bird feeder so it was about time we combined graphing and birds.

We created a graph and put it out in the hallway. We have photographs of the nine birds we know and recognize from our feeder. For the next week we are going to watch our bird feeder for two periods every morning and put a sticker above the birds we see. Then we will see which birds we see the most and which ones the least.

We also made predictions about what birds the children think they will see the most. Using those multi-purpose head shots I blogged about earlier, we glued the child's head beside the name of the bird they thought they would see the most and we posted those predictions out in the hallway too.

Now all that is left to do is sit back and watch the birds come to feed.