Category: Infant

Messing About with Glue

4/28/2020

An offering for the children and families of Room 3

While working with glue with infants and young toddlers can be a bit messy, it can provide a new and interesting sensory experience for your child with something easily accessible at home.

Glueing is a fun way to work together to create an original work of art that can can support fine motor coordination and provide a new and engaging creative experience.

In the past, teachers have offered glue alongside a paintbrush or something that can be used as a paintbrush (flowers, leaves, sticks, pipe cleaners, etc.) and materials that children can use to stick to a paper. Both solid and liquid glue offer different, fun, sensory experiences.

The Room 3 teachers suggest putting down big pieces of paper or newspaper over the surface you plan on using to work, and then having a warm, wet cloth around to wipe off excess glue and your child's hands.

Possible materials:

Pom pom balls
Natural materials from outside
Cut outs from magazines
Cut up cardboard
Construction paper
Food, such as dry beans or rice
Yarn
Pieces of fabric

0 Comments

Creating a Time Capsule

4/24/2020

0 Comments

An offering for the families of Room 4

The teachers of Room 4, reflecting on that fact that we are truly living through a historical moment in time, realized that when our children are older they will likely want to know details. As time passes we will inevitably forget the details of our everyday lives during this quarantine, so they extended an invitation to the families to add to their children's Journey Books (Portfolios).

They included a series of questions to help guide the families who chose to join them in this experience.

What do you and your child look forward to most during these days together?
What is one funny or lighthearted thing that has happened.
What has been challenging?
What is your child’s favorite book/activity/phrase/movie/song/snack etc. right now?
What is something new your child has started doing since quarantine that they weren’t doing before? / What is something new they’ve learned?
Family members, what is life like in your eyes right now? What do you want to tell your child now for them to read years later about this time?
If possible, please include a picture to add to this memento.

0 Comments

Messing About With Tape

4/22/2020

0 Comments

An offering for the children of Room 5

Tape is a simple, low-mess yet incredibly engaging material for Toddlers. Below are some pictures of how Room 5 has used tape in the classroom.

How can tape be used to support children's exploration of line and trajectory?
How can tape be combined with other materials, such as blocks, people, animals, cars, etc?
Can you invite your child to line objects on top of the line, or build vertically?
Or maybe you could just set some lines up with tape and observe your child freely explore this invitation?

Exploring tape and lines with cars, trucks, and vehicles.

Could tape be presented in a way that represents the lines of a road? Could cars or other vehicles drive on this road? What else could be added to the road? Tunnels, cones, people?

Or perhaps tape is combined with light or presented on a table or with other objects. Maybe it is presented in a way that just allows the children to freely explore the material...tape!

In Room 5, the children are often observed peeling the tape off the table, or wrapping the tape around certain objects. You could present the tape in small pieces or larger, long pieces and just see what your child does with the tape.

What are some other ideas that you have for exploring tape?

0 Comments

An Inventory of Familiar Sounds

4/9/2020

0 Comments

An offering for the infants in Room 2

As the Room 2 teachers continue to ponder the relationship between humans and sound, they have been talking together about the emotional nature of hearing familiar and routinely heard sounds. They are imagining the infants in their home environments, experiencing sounds and further developing associations for them. They heard an example of an infant who can hear the garage door when their parent comes home, and responds by crawling in anticipation toward the door where they enter the house.

At school, the teachers and children have listened with the infants to the gurgle of the bottle warmer, a sign that their bottle is on its way. They have observed infants quickly relax at the sound of the noise machines being turned on for a nap, and one who even kicks and dances to the sound of the spray bottle after a diaper change.

What sounds are signals to the infants at home? How do the infants demonstrate that they have a relationship to a sound? What times are these relationships strongest, perhaps shared times, like meals? If you are taking walks or having time outside... are there sounds that are particular to the neighborhood (ex. construction) or the time of year (ex. birds singing) that infants are paying close attention to?

Attending to the sounds in the environment can be helpful in keeping us grounded and finding peace in difficult times, and infants are models at helping adults remember to tune into the present.

The teachers of Room 2 invite the families to share what sorts of sound relationships families see with their infants at home to compile an inventory of familiar "home" sounds of the Room 2 infants!

0 Comments

A message from our pets

4/7/2020

9 Comments

We have received a message from our beloved pets who are holding down the fort at school!
Click through the pictures to see what our little animal friends are up to.

Thank you to our Assistant Director, Marisa Wheeler, for taking dictation!

What messages do your children want to send back?
Do you have pets or stuffies who might like to correspond?

9 Comments

Invitations around climbing

4/6/2020

0 Comments

An offering for the children of Room 3

While at school, some of the research questions the children and teachers of Room 3 were researching included:

What are the children interested in climbing on and why?
What concepts are the children exploring through climbing?
How does sound/texture/color influence what the children are climbing on?
What are children learning about cause and effect through their body movements?

The teachers offered these questions to guide and extend experiences at home:

What can be can be rearranged at home to offer different climbing structures for your children?
- Examples include rearranging various blocks at home, using boxes to create a climbing structure, or simply going outside and finding a new spot to explore!
What are you all noticing about how your child's body movements are changing at home?
What are they climbing at home?

0 Comments

Sleeping Bunnies

4/3/2020

0 Comments

Sleeping bunnies is one of our favorite songs at Boulder Journey School. It has been sung across all of our classrooms for years!

Mentor Teacher Lauren Berry and her sister (Boulder Journey School Teacher Education Program Alum) Paige sing Sleeping Bunnies for everyone.

0 Comments

Expanding our Sound Work

4/2/2020

0 Comments

An offering for the infant class from Mentor Teacher, Maureen Condon

When we think about sound, we also may think about how sounds make us feel.

We are curious:

what does your current background sound like?
What are your favorite sounds? Soothing sounds? Energizing sounds?

In Reggio Emilia, Italy, some educators and families have begun to record "sound riddles" while at home during this time. From the Reggio Children website:

Our homes are a “symphony of sounds”: try to look around and find fun, strange, or curious sounds in your home, in the garden, on the balcony, at the windows, and make recordings of them. They can be sounds produced by objects, animals, nature, or everyday things, that you can make into new SOUND RIDDLES.

Thinking about the infant class in relation to sound, I was reminded of an excerpt from the book Brain Matters, by Patricia Wolfe:

Research shows that the human brain is predisposed to detect patterns in both music and language. It is interesting that we prefer to favor certain types of musical patterns over others. Canadian researcher Sandra Trehub has found that infants prefer consonant to dissonant passages. Four-month old infants demonstrate a preference for hearing Mozart sonatas as originally written, compared to "unnatural" versions (Krumhansl & Jusczyk, 1996).

When we think about preferences as it relates to sound, I for one, can't help but think about how we notice and observe these preferences(both in ourselves and others). For example, I listened to the sound riddles offered by Reggio Children and had a strong adverse reaction to Sound 2(and Sound 3 actually). Sound 8 made me smile and Sound 9 (at least the beginning) I would play in the infant room.

I could feel my body language and facial expression shift as I listened to each of these sounds. I think about the infants in Room 2 and how we notice their reaction to sounds. As I'm sure you all recall, we often have a white noise machine on and different soothing "spa" music on in the background. There are also times we open up the door to the classroom, letting some of that lively hall sound come on in!

What we notice is that sound makes a difference. The children notice changes and we notice their awareness of these changes through their cues. The children are very tuned into their soundscape. When we turn off the sound machines and open that hall door, eyes shift and widen, movements and vocalizations change. We notice new action when we shift the soundscape. Changing the soundscape makes a difference in how the children feel and how they express those feelings. The deep vibration of humming can be soothing and the laughter of children playing can be stimulating.

I offer this information to you because young children are very in tune with the sounds around them and will also contribute their own sounds, as I'm sure you all know.

So, if we intentionally play sounds for them after becoming present with the soundscape ourselves, what are their reactions?

What sounds bring joy?

What sounds bring energy?

What sounds bring calm?

How does our relationship to sound impact our creation of sound?

And moreover, how does our interaction with this soundscape as adults not only impact how our children feel but also, how we feel in return!?

For me, I know I'll be playing a lot of spa music in the next couple of days. Lots of love and soothing sounds your way.

0 Comments