Valentines Day
This year, our JK group will have a Valentine card exchange at school. While we don’t generally observe holidays at Park West, we really like to share the literacy and community building aspects of exchanging Valentines with kids. If you want your child to participate, they should bring one card for each classmate on February 14, with each child’s name marked on the outside. These can be simple store-bought cards or hand made, but please don’t include treats or candies. If your child is interested in doing some or all of the writing, that’s great. Some kids are really motivated to write their friends’ names. Others may not want to write any of the names, or may want to just write one or some of the names.
Any approach is fine. We want this to be an enjoyable experience for kids, and don’t want them to feel pressured to do more writing than they are ready for. We thought it might be helpful to let you know now, so you have time to spread out the task in a manageable way for kids. Some may like to work on all of them at once, but others will benefit from spreading it out over more days. See what works for your child.
Block Play
Block play is something we deeply value here at school because it provides rich opportunities for development. Through block play, children grapple with many mathematical concepts including counting, measurement, comparing, proportion, symmetry and balance. In fact, research has linked block play with math competence in later stages of life. In addition, children gain firsthand experience with scientific principles related to gravity, balance and weight. Block play provides natural opportunities to make and test hypotheses, promotes both gross and fine motor development, aids spatial awareness and provides opportunities for collaboration and negotiation with peers.
Block building follows a natural progression and we often see children fluidly move between different stages of block building and combine them in their play. In the classroom, we provide large hollow blocks, which allow children to build structures that they can play in as well as unit blocks, which are smaller and allow for more intricate constructions.
As well-loved as our blocks are, we have noticed that our numbers are starting to dwindle as blocks get worn out and retired or lost. We decided it was time to get some new ones and enlisted children’s help in taking inventory of our block supply. Teachers made a chart with each block’s shape on it. As a whole group, we matched the actual blocks to the outlines and then counted each type of block.
Everyone agreed that it would be nice to have more unit blocks. Teachers showed a few pictures of block constructions and children identified particular shapes that they thought we most needed. Teachers ordered new blocks and have been introducing them gradually. We started with the square shaped blocks, also called half-units. After introducing them at group time, we offered each child just a few of these blocks to build with during table time. Having only a few blocks to work with inspired interesting designs. It was exciting to see how many different configurations children made and their interest in each other’s building.
We have continued to introduce each type of block individually and offer different combinations of blocks to children at tabletime. It has been exciting to see the building that these news blocks have inspired.
Children have continued to explore block building at free play and created many creative and interesting structures.
