NEWSLETTER
Hunting for Signs of Spring
As our campus continues to reflect the spring season, we began to engage in more in-depth discussions about the different "signs" of spring that we see and feel around us. After the children shared their ideas such as spring is "being warmer" and "leaves and flowers grow," we read a simple book that discussed the different signs of spring. This visual connection bridged the children's ideas and experiences with written text, and led us to our first "Spring Walk" of the season.
In order to guide our spring walk and make further text-to-self connections, the children chose different pictures from the text to "hunt" for. Pictures such as worms, birds, leaves, and flowers were carried outside, and the children actively looked for their chosen one. When they found a connection, they let us and their friends know, and we all explored the finding. The child then documented their finding by taking a picture of it for us to explore later.
At each finding the children practiced their oral language development when they described what they found, and tapped into their working and long term memory to share their prior experiences with these spring moments. They used a variety of vocabulary to describe and compare and contrast their findings, which exposes everyone to new words.
Discussing and Labeling our Spring Walk Photos
We began by exploring all of the pictures from the visit, and engaged in conversation about what was happening in the pictures and what we remembered from the visit. Once we finished the discussion of the pictures, we identified the label that matched the "sign of spring" in each picture. This picture/word connection keeps reminding children that there is a label for each thing that they identify.
And finally, we took this opportunity to incorporate writing by having each child write the label for the spring pictures. Each child was given a picture and matching label, and wrote the word under the pictures. It was very exciting to write such big important words and many children wanted to write more than one. After all of the words were written we read them back together and counted the amount of letters in each word.
