Introducing...The Monthly Mural!

Over the past few months, we have been working on a lot of murals. This group of Frogs seems to gravitate towards painting projects, the bigger the better. If we set out paper and paint, you can bet that within two minutes, all nine children will be gathered around, quietly focusing on painting together for 30 minutes or more. It is quite remarkable to watch!
This morning, we had planned on setting out paper and paint to start a new cooperative painting project. When I went in to the art studio to grab a piece of paper, I noticed a mural that we had started last month that was on top of the drying rack. Rather than cut a new sheet of mural paper, I grabbed that instead.
We will often save children's artwork and put out the same sheet of paper over several easel sessions. It is interesting to see how a child will approach and work with the lines and colors that are already on the page.
Today, we put our fall colored mural from October out with trays of paint and matchbox cars to see where the frogs went with it. Here are the results;

We will continue adding to this mural every month, just to see what happens. It should be an interesting way to track our progress through the year!

Fall Curriculum

Wikipedia defines 'Emergent Curriculum' as "a way of planning curriculum based on the student’s interest and passions as well as the teacher’s". Often, at the beginning of the school year, we teachers will toss out an idea for a curriculum theme to see if the children run with it. Since we are lukcy enough to live in a climate where the change from summer to fall is quite dramatic, we teachers decided to take some inspiration from the spectacular colors that we noticed outside our windows and all around our neighborhood.

We collected leaves from outside and looked at the different sizes, shapes and colors. Then we cut out maple and oak leaf shapes and used paint and unusual brushes to make our paper leaves look like the ones we found outside.

It became apparent that this year's Frog group is particularly excited about painting, so we used fall colors to create several murals.

We wanted to bring the season into many different areas of learning, not just art. We added silk leaves, gourds, small dolls and a small tree to our manipulatives area.

We also took advantage of our fall parent work day by enlisting a parent volunteer to spruce up our book corner with the addition of some inexpensive and super practical rain gutter bookshelves. We added a number of fall themed books, both fiction and non-fiction. The new display, combined with some additional cozy seating, seemed to really encourage the children to curl up with a good fall book!

While the children enjoyed exploring all of the Fall themed activities, after a while we noticed that the kids were throwing out some curriculum ideas of their own;

Every time we turned around, we found that the Frogs had lined up all of the chairs from the lunch table in the middle of the classroom. Sometimes the chairs were a train, sometimes a bus, sometimes a train. Since we can take a hint, we started to plan out some activities that expanded on the idea of travel and transportation.

Of course, sometimes outside influences have a hand in directing curriculum as well. Unfortunately, over the past few weeks one of the biggest overarching themes in the Frog room has been illness! the Flu tore through our group pretty quickly, leaving us with a few weeks of super small classes, and sniffle-y kids. We put some of our more elaborate transportation themed projects on the back burner while everyone recuperated, and took advantage of the smaller class size to scaffold social interactions between children.

Now that everyone is on the mend (knock wood!), we are back to exploring transportation, and travel. Stay tuned to see where this takes us!