This week the children are learning new songs and fingerplays with Yueying. She's absolutely wonderful and the children are very engaged in her activities. The children learned a new song about a little dog and are working on a fingerplay about a caterpillar and rabbit. Yesterday the children learned about families while playing with the dollhouse and the new panda family.
Yueying has joined us this week and is our third Chinese teacher on staff. Having three Chinese teachers will allow us to provide all three classes with Chinese language instruction every day. Yueying will primarily work with the preschoolers. After Yueying finishes her training she and Amber will rotate as floater teachers in the baby house as needed.
Yueying is from Guangdong where she was a preschool and kindergarten teacher for three years before coming to the US. She has been in the US for a year and half. She loves kids and is very excited to work with our children. Today Yueying read one of the "Spot" books to the children and introduced new vocabulary to them.
Today the preschoolers finished their unit study about Oregon. We set up a campground in the gym where they played for the entire day. Children paddled in the canoe on the lake, sang songs around the campfire, and napped in sleeping bags. The toddlers joined us in our celebration for the morning. One even asked if the blue mat was real water! Later in the afternoon we made s'mores at the kitchen gas stove.
This week the children are learning about mountains in Oregon and how they are formed. On Monday the children talked about the mountains we could see from Portland and then watched a video of Mt. St. Helens erupting. We looked at several pictures of other Oregon mountains and then drew pictures of Mt. Hood. Later in the afternoon we did a volcano experiment and watched "lava" erupt from a papier mache mountain. Later this week the children will look at animals that live in mountain habitats, and then we'll end the week learning about Crater Lake.
The preschoolers worked with both wet and dry chalk today. They drew pictures with dry sidewalk chalk and as they worked talked about their art. They were able to describe different aspects of the chalk on their papers. Next they drew pictures with wet chalk that they dipped in water. The children then compared the wet and dry chalk drawings. They discovered that the color of the chalk was more intense when it is wet. The preschool is currently using the book Art for the Very Young by Elizabeth Kelly. The goal of the book is to help children explore different elements of art using a variety of mediums.
The preschoolers have been learning how to count in Chinese, and we have been hearing a lot of good feedback from the parents. Today, we were talking about the Big Counting Book during class and learned to count from one to fifteen in Chinese! We also learned how to write one, two and three in both Chinese and Arabic numerals. We had a lot of fun learning and counting, and we all know counting in yi, er, san, just like A, B, C, easy as one, two, three!
Teacher Helen
