New school year, new friends!

This first full week of preschool allowed us to talk about friends and family and get to know one another better.  In this blog post we will be focusing on the importance of building social/emotional development skills as a part of our every day curriculum.

Some of our preschoolers this year are brand new to the program while others are veteran pirates.  This means that some of our pirates are still figuring out how to do school while others are busy helping new students learn the ropes.

Throughout this week we did talk about family and make things for our families as well as projects that represented the people in our families but we also talked about friends and the things we do with friends as well as family. 

While we read books and sang songs about friends and family this week, we did a lot more learning about what it means to be a good friend by doing various things together and talking about how we make others feel with our actions.  
We tried out some yoga moves alone and then with a partner to see how helping a friend can make a person feel good and help that friend have more success when trying new things.

We worked in our kitchen this week a lot with dramatic play and free play choice allowing the children time to learn about sharing and playing in small groups.  Rules about social cues mean nothing until they are tested out to see how it feels when someone takes a toy you wanted to play with or someone will not give you a turn with something.  We learned how to ask for things instead of just taking them away from people too.  All the while talking about how actions we take influence how other people feel.

Children in the preschool stage of development are still undergoing a feeling of autonomy which means they struggle to understand how others feel because they have been so focused on their own feelings instead.  By understanding this we are able to talk more about these feelings of others and relate them back to the children to help them see the connection that other people can feel sad, mad, jealous too.

We have a lot of table games in preschool and used many of them this week to work on structured play with the children.  These games allowed for clear turn taking and patience.  We know that a person's attention span is his age so it made sense to allow the children only a few minutes with each game to change things up while still teaching the same concept.

We worked at helping one another trace each preschooler and work together to decide what kind of hair, eyes and clothing we wanted on our life-sized self-portraits.  The children laughed and laughed as they pointed out the parts of themselves and their friends on that papers as they added things to look more like each other.

Later we did some classroom magic together with our friends making paper people magnetized with small magnets and moving them with magnet wands together to have the paper children play together.  While we did this we talked about what they do together with friends and what they like to do alone.

Many of our other games this week helped us to spell and do letter recognition as a team as we had to share and ask one another if they had the letter we needed or the image we were trying to match.  All of the social skills we worked on this week will help make our year more successful as we continue to incorporate social skills in our lessons.

There are three major types of play we recognize and work with in school that are developmentally appropriate for this age group.  The first stage of play is solitary, this is how your child probably played at home for a long time and might still do.  A child displaying solitary play is a child who is completely engrossed in her own game, activity, toy, etc.  She will not want to share, take turns or probably even talk much to you as she plays because this is her time and she is focused on what she wants to do.

Then we have parallel play which is where you child might look like he is playing with someone at first glance but they are really just playing near another person.  Sometimes children in this stage even ask someone to, "come play with me," only to get upset when the other person tries to use something he wanted to play with or placed somewhere very specific to his thought.

Then we have cooperative play.  This is typical of our five-year-olds above any other age in our program.  These children are typically developmentally ready and eager to take turns, enjoy organized games and follow the rules of the game so everyone is fair.  This is a natural process for all people and often those with older siblings tend to reach this stage sooner and those without siblings at home of age to socially play take a bit longer to reach this stage of cooperation.  

The games we choose to play in school as well as the activities always have many purposes but social development is always an important key to shape as a teacher.  Our high school preschool teachers have been doing an amazing job building dialog and expressing their own feelings to the children to help coach and model what we expect from our preschoolers but it also provides an opportunity to learn about perspectives other than one's own which is how we foster a love of life long learning.

As we move forward throughout the year, we will be observing and assessing your child's social skills and ability to work with others.  Some of the children play more with adults than peers so that will be our focus while other children prefer to play alone and we will be trying to support them as they branch out to make new friends.   Know that the power of our program lies in the amount of pirate teachers we have and our ability to differentiate to each child's needs because there are so many of us. 

What's coming up?

• This coming week we will be talking about safety as well as hygiene and how keeping our bodies clean we can be safer from germs.  We also will be learning about police and fire safety though it will be covered again in the spring when visits from officials will be more likely.
  
• The week of September 23rd is Homecoming Week at PHS so we will be asking our little pirates to dress up with us for spirit week to show their school spirit. 

• On Monday, September 23rd please wear flannel (either pajamas or plaid will work.)
• On Wednesday September25th please wear black and white for our 100 year anniversary of PHS and the good old days of black and white TV.
• Friday is our field trip to the farm but please wear red (as you are welcome to do every Friday) or any pirate gear you may have.
  
• Friday, September 27th will be the day of our Arlington Crest Farms Field trip and a note with more details went home on Friday.  Please text us if you did not get it and we can send it to you digitally.