Park Play

We are so fortunate to have a park less than a five minute walk from school! As a teaching pair, we have taken advantage of this great opportunity for the last two years, and now going into our third. We find this weekly outing to have so many wonderful benefits.

1. Part of the Reggio philosophy includes exposing the children into the community. By doing so, this gives us an opportunity for real life interaction with adults, children and animals they are unfamiliar with. We work with our children to appropriately approach and respond in these situations, especially those who have animals. This will only help our students to feel more safe and confident in public. 
2. The park provides a larger space for lots of running. Need I say more?
3. The park also has a great playground that allows the children to exercise different muscles than our play structures at school. Many of the children have already mastered monkey bars, ladders, and getting onto a swing independently. 
4. A deeper connection to nature is promoted through our weekly park trips. We allow the children to explore the "forest" along the sides of the park, with supervision of course. During these explorations, they often observe and collect their surroundings. With their collections, we are able to return to the classroom and further investigate their findings. 
5. Each of the five senses is deeply integrated into daily activites within the school. However, by visiting the park, we are creating new experiences for the children to explore with each sense. 
6. By visiting the park, we are putting the children in a new setting, creating new and different opportunities for inquisition.  

Self Portraits // Journals

Self Portraits. If you have not done them with your child(ren) or students, we highly recommend giving it a try! It is unbelievable how telling they can be about a child; it directly shows where they are in their development and how they view themselves.

Is their head separate of their body? Or is their head and body the same?
How much detail? Eyebrows? Eyelashes? Fingers? Clothing?
Are body part connected or apart?

In our experience the answers to the above questions are telling of the child; someone who is spatially unaware in the classroom often will draw their body parts detached from one another. Or a child who is more observant of their surroundings will have more detail in the self portrait.

Here, another teachers describes their experience with self-portraits.

In past years, we had the children draw self portraits at the beginning and end to include in their portfolios. This year, we opted to make the portraits more relevant to the children by making them the cover of their journals.

Here is an example of one child's portrait this year. She will be 5 in December. This child chose to draw long hair for herself, despite having shorter hair. Again, self portraits may not always portray the child as they are, but how they personally view themselves. We can also see that this child has a separate head with eyes, nose and a mouth. She also made her body into a triangular shape, denoting that she's wearing a dress- which she often does. The arms, legs, hands, and feet are all attached, and she even included fingers.

Journals, what in the world are we going to do with these? EVERYTHING! The child has a story to share, we write it in the journal. We are observing a specimen in the microscope, but it in the journal. Someone else wants to draw their family, put it in the journal. Every journal entry is dated and the children do as much of the writing and drawing as possible. We have also started asking the children to plan their creations and draw them first to encourage intention. Again, these plans go in the journal. 

We are hoping to accomplish several goals through use of the journals. As I already mentioned, intention, but the journals also will help us to stay organized and have a good view of the child: their interests and development.