Introducing Classroom Jobs!

tcarmichael2

Sep 14

3 min read

Whole Group Times

Today, we began our meeting time by introducing classroom jobs. Each Monday, the children will be assigned a job around the classroom. These jobs help to build our classroom community and give the children an opportunity to take ownership of different tasks around the room. The jobs range from a myriad of “meeting jobs” to line leader and watering the classroom plants. They will keep their job for the entire week, and everyone will have the opportunity to do each job multiple times throughout the school year. Once the jobs were introduced, it was time for the children with meeting jobs to help with our meeting. Sanvi helped count the children to see if everyone was in JK as we started our day. Jack did the calendar, Ethan told everyone the weather, and Nora helped with the number line. We keep track of the days we have been in school in two ways: with the number line and with base ten blocks in jars representing the place values. We will explain both of these systems, as well as the classroom jobs, more thoroughly at Curriculum Night on September 29th. Meeting jobs ended with Eyza telling us what was happening throughout our day as the schedule helper. Then, Tracey read the meeting message, and it was time to sign in.

This morning’s sign in question asked the children how old they were. The children put their ages on a graph, and then we looked at the graph together and analyzed the results.

The beginning of the school year finds us easing into a more academic curriculum, as we first need to build up the children’s stamina and ability to sit for longer group times. We want our math and literacy times to be experiences that the children look forward to and feel excited about.

We are also very focused on the social and emotional aspect of creating our classroom community. The academics will come, but creating connections among the students themselves, as well as between the students and teachers, is our priority during these first few weeks of JK.

Today we had our math block after outside time. Two times a week we will have dedicated math lessons and two times a week we will have dedicated literacy blocks. This does not mean that we do not do math and literacy activities at other times. In fact, you will see on this blog that our JK program allows for many opportunities for the children to connect with math and literacy concepts throughout the day. Today we talked about how math works with number concepts while literacy works with letters (reading, writing, etc). We had the children count to 10 and then they worked on counting together. Tracey had cards that had the numbers 1-10 and each child had a turn to come and choose a card. The student read the number on the card and then could either count out the corresponding amount of gems, or do a movement that number of times. We were impressed with the children's ability to count objects/claps/hops/twirls up to 10! Not everyone had a chance to go today, so those children who did not have a turn today will go during our next math time on Wednesday. You can ask your child, if they went today, if they chose to count gems, twirl, hop, or clap!

At the end of the day we read We Don't Eat Our Classmates.

Classroom Explorations

On the first day of a new school week we introduce our sensory trays for the week. This week's sensory trays have clear slime. Today we had some sprinkles, ice cream cups and spoons, and other cutting tools to use with the slime. You will find that we provide many sensory experiences for the children during our classroom exploration time throughout the week. Sensory play has so many benefits for a young child. At our activity table we had wood slices and watercolor paint for the children to paint that we will hang in the classroom as decorations. The thin watercolor brushes are great for working on fine motor control and developing a proper grip for writing. We also had open: