It´s the little things in life

Working with three year-olds requires a lot of patience, changes of scenery on a fairly regular basis, and of course, an extra supply of clothing less than one hundred meters away (fortunately my house isn’t even that far from the school).  Of course most of you already know this, many of you having already raised children on your own.

I sometimes wonder what my kiddos do at home, and how they use the information that they learned at school. The Pre-Kinder 3 class so far has learned/reviewed (in English): colors, numbers 1-10, counting and being able to identify how many of something there are, singing twinkle twinkle little star, identifying Mr. Owl, Mr. Rooster, Iguanas ( we count as many as we can.. but sometimes there are more than 15 and we can’t quite get that high), birds, the campus dog, and butterflies! We also practice our joga (yoga) every two or three days, starting with our heads on the table in the dark classroom, calming ourselves and pretending to wake up with stretching and breathing, and then moving to a circle on the floor where we meditate (no joke, they sit cross-legged and put their pointer finger to their thumb and go “mmmmmmmmmmmm”… and then they speed up until their vocal chords get sore and that’s how we cut it off). We then stretch our fingers, arms, shoulders, necks, legs, backs, and then we lay down on the floor and breathe.

The three year olds also enjoy doing art projects (we regularly play with playdough, paint, markers and crayons) and reading books, along with building with blocks, playing in our play room (giant soft blocks, a little kids kitchen, and a train and car track set).

I hope that all of these activities are really helping my students. Many of them are able to regurgitate information well but I hope that it builds and sticks in their brains... we do a lot during our half days (along with watching parts of movies that often have something to do with what we are talking about in our books.. such as Finding Nemo when talking about fish or apparently, Wizard of Oz, because it has a horse that changes colors quickly.. which is insanely exciting when you’re three… note, they chose Wizard of Oz).

Oh, and they go to P.E. class, which one of my kiddos doesn’t like. Actually, he’s terrified of P.E. as our P.E. teacher reminds him of a monster in one of his movies and every time we take him to P.E. he either promptly pukes, or stands in the corner and hides. 

More updates from the land of pee pee, poo poo, and ¨puhlease¨ soon.