NEWSLETTER
Check out the photos from our field trip here!
We had such a great field trip to the Nature Center and Park last week! This week we revisited our trip through pictures. This is a common practice in our classroom - pictures help trigger the children's memory of an experience and recall what they did by looking at the picture. In past experiences, the children have verbally identified what was in the picture and then the teacher has written the word as a way to label the picture. This time the children did the writing!
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. We chose a key word from each picture discussion to label that part of the experience. We discussed that "labeling is writing a word or words to describe a picture," and that we can then use those words to verbally describe the picture to someone. The difference in this experience is that we wrote the words in highlighter not dark pen. The children then had the job of tracing the letters to "write" the word.
We had so many words documented by the end of the slideshow! Our next step was to read and write those important words...
We then used this experience as an opportunity to introduce tracing, practice writing and observe each child's pencil grips. Pencil grips are an evolving and ever-changing fine motor skill in the preschool years. The more opportunities the children have to practice their grip and get feedback and help, the stronger the skill gets. Tracing highlighted words is an excellent way to practice because it requires eye-teaming and hand-eye coordination to write over the highlighted lines. We will use this resource often in preschool and gradually make the highlighted letters lighter and lighter until they are gone and the children can write the word written on a card on their own. You'll be amazed at what they can write on their own and how much this skill grows by the end of the year!
The children loved this writing experience. Their level of concentration as they traced and their excitement as they finished a word was amazing. We had to bring out more sentence strips and hand out more words because they were so invested in the experience! Seeing how much they enjoyed this type of activity will help us to guide our future activities. If we see that the children thrive in a certain type of experience, we will do it more often. We definitely have a group of writers in this class, which is so exciting!
After we labeled all of the pictures, we held up each one and read the label. We then hung the pictures up in the classroom so that the children could continue to look at them and discuss the field trip. We also wanted to showcase their writing! They all worked hard to write their words and were very proud of their work.
