Smart Start 2022/2023: Week 26

WELCOME SPRING!

Week 26 welcomed the official start of spring and all things letter W. We worked with Wikki Sticks, drove things with wheels, and moved like the water and the wind. Often our play invitations invite our students to engage in new, real-world skills. This week that skill was washing dishes.

If you're looking for some extra help with the dinner dishes, these kiddos can help! We were very impressed with their scrubbing skills. They enjoyed washing dishes so much that we ran out of dishes to wash. We ended up washing dishes, dinosaurs, and animals!

Writing names with Wikki Sticks

Making Art!

Playing, whether inside with cars or outside with chalk and bubbles, provides a million opportunities for growing in kindness and cooperation. Play is the work of childhood and as our students play they learn to share their ideas, negotiate, and share. They build patience, respect, and how to work together. Here's an example:

Welcome to the Wig Shoppe! Each week we change out our Imagination Station. For the letter W, we filled it with wigs, hair accessories, and mustaches. Absolute hilarity ensued. These actors and actresses created stories, characters, and accents as they played and it was the best kind of fun!

Here's a look at morning invitations. We build lots of time into our schedule for free, self-directed learning, creating, and play. Students choose their tools and spaces and have the freedom to make their own learning and fun. Sometimes that looks like making art on the floor or making up a new and exciting adventure!

Other learning and exploration this week included:

• Moving with light and heavy weight

• Sign language to Louis Armstrong's What a Wonderful World

• Learning about the water cycle

• Making a cloud in a jar

• Reading! So many emerging readers!!!!

• Circle Time

• Journaling