Bananas for Learning

February Study: Buildings-Part II Once again, our month was filled with snow, two-hour delays, and virtual learning! It's made it a little difficult to get through the building study, but we continued on!  Week 3 of our study looked at what makes a building a building and the materials used to make them. We talked about why we need windows in buildings, why they have a roof, and why the foundation needs to be made out of concrete. We read some great books like Building Our House  and went back to the versions of The Three Little Pigs to talk about why each house fell down. We also built towers out of different materials to see which one was the most sturdy or would make the tallest tower. The children really loved doing these different investigations and experiments. I find the more open-ended questions I ask, the more complex and deep their learning goes.  In week 4, we talked about what makes our building-Frankie Lemmon-so special. We did an investigation where we walke...

  January Study: Buildings Happy New Year! We hope you all enjoyed your holidays with family and friends. It was nice to have some time off, but we were definitely ready to see our Bananas again! For January, I really wanted to dive into one of our Teaching Strategies Gold curriculum studies; something that takes a broad topic and investigates it more deeply week-by-week. We have a very creative group of creators and builders in this classroom, so I figured the buildings study would be perfect.  The block center had lots of different building materials, such as hollow blocks, small blocks, and MEGA blocks. They also had construction vehicles to help in their projects. We put out pictures of famous buildings around the world and ways they could copy them with the blocks in this center. The dramatic play center became a construction site! We used real tools where we could, had an architect station for planning, and lots of boxes to help create lots of different structures. The o...

  December Study: Gingerbread The holidays and the month of December are my favorite time of year! Yes, the children are full of sugar and excitement for upcoming events, but nothing matches the joy that comes from watching a kid enjoy all the magic of the season. In order to respect a variety of cultures and backgrounds, we chose to focus on holiday baking and gingerbread during the month of December.  We set up our dramatic play center to be the Banana Bakery and the students loved it! We used as many real materials as we could, including a variety of cake pans, utensils, and ingredients (sealed TIGHTLY!). They looked at different recipes and pictures of baked goods to find what they wanted to create for their customers. This was a very popular center everyday and they looked forward to make things for people they loved.  Our sensory table was extra fun as I filled it with a gingerbread cloud dough. Cloud dough is mostly flour and vegetable oil, but we also mixed some c...

November Study: Leaves + Turkeys After all the sugar and excitement of Halloween, we needed to come back down to earth and spend some time outside! Early November is peak season for leaves changing color in North Carolina and it was the perfect study for the few weeks we had between Halloween and Thanksgiving.  As we start most our studies, we had students notice what was changing outside. We talked about the different kinds of leaves we saw and sorted them by the kind of tree they belonged to. We asked questions about why the leaves were falling or why they changed color and investigated by watching videos from scientists and watching time lapse videos of trees changing from spring to winter. These conversations led us to talk a little bit about seasons and the changes that we see in each one. We talked about clothes that we wear in each season as well as how the weather dictates what activities we can do in each season.  As the month went on, we started talking about Thanksg...

  October Study: Apples + Pumpkins We finished our first month of school and let ourselves 'fall' right into learning about all things apples and pumpkins. We started with a two week study on apples. We knew that all the kids had tried apples, but as I said in a post or two ago, our goal is to go deeper into our studies and find out more about how and where they go, what they look like on the inside and why, and how we can use apples.  Each day our question of the day revolved around something related to apples. Additionally, after morning meeting, we would look at a different fact or feature about apples. We did an apple investigation where we started by describing the outside of the apple (texture, shape, size), measured it with unifix cubes, cut it open to describe the inside of the apple, and counted how many seeds were inside. The children loved when I called them 'scientists' and they were so excited to explore such a simple food that they are so used to seeing. T...

  September Study: The First Six Weeks We have officially wrapped up our first month of school! It has been a whirlwind of fun, laughter, a few tears, and lots of joy. The majority of our focus has been on learning the rules, expectations, and procedures within our classroom. We have practiced washing our hands a countless number of times, how to wait in a line, how we sit on the carpet for large group instruction, how to clean up, how we clean up after meals, and so much more! While some of these things feel instinctual to us now, we have to remember that kids don't come into school knowing all of these concepts so it is up to us to teach them each step so that they can master the skill. It feels tedious in the beginning, but it definitely pays off later and gives us much more time to learn and play later1 We've also been practicing how to use our school tools. We talked about how scissors are for paper and NEVER hair or our bodies, we practiced putting caps on markers so they...