Beautiful Environments

I put a lot of thought into my classroom environment and relish the opportunity to go to other teacher's classrooms or centres to have a sneaky peak at how they have set up their environment and steal a few ideas.

One centre I visited a while ago was Bear Park at Mount Eden in Auckland, New Zealand and their beautiful environment is one which continues to inspire me.  Here are some pics that will hopefully inspire you too...

The entrance way included philosophy statements, photos of the teachers and books containing current learning stories

The children's family photos

This is one idea that I incorporated into my classroom straight away and now, at the beginning of every year,  I ask each child to bring in a framed photo of their family.  Over the years I have witnessed children holding, kissing and talking to their family photos emphasising how important this little piece of home is to children who have just started school. 

Things I love about Bear Park's space:

• The environment welcomes you as soon as you walk in the door and is reflective of the children, their families and the teachers who spend their time there. 
• Children's work is beautifully displayed in a way that communicates that their work is important and valued.
• Materials and resources are presented to children in a way that provokes their curiosity and creativity.
• But most of all - the time and care that has gone into developing such a lovely space for children to play in!

Block Play

Our block area is a very well used area of our classroom and is constantly evolving. I try to keep the materials on offer open ended and where possible natural. Here are a few things we currently have in our block play area...

And some of the children's creations...

 Dinosaurs

Houses & Castles

There are clip boards and paper, pencils and black markers available to the children and I encourage them to design what they are going to build. This has proven particularly useful when a group of children are working together as the drawing helps to communicate everyone's ideas and allows each child to pick out a particular part of the construction to work on. The children also use these materials to make signs for their constructions. 

Here are just some of the things the children are learning during block play:

• To be creative problem solvers
• How to plan and put abstract ideas into action
• To listen to and be respectful of the ideas of others
• To negotiate and solve arguments arising from differences in opinion in a positive manner
• Spatial awareness
• Mathematical and scientific concepts such as gravity, stability, balance, height, length and shape

Personalised Alphabet Book

This past term we have been learning all about letters and sounds. To consolidate this we made an alphabet big book. 

Each child chose a letter card and glued Easter egg wrappers that they had torn into small pieces over the top of their letter. 

They then drew a picture of something that began with the letter they had chosen. 

During this activity my teacher aide and I encouraged lots of talk about the name, shape and sound of the letters each child had chosen.

Once finished, we laminated each A3 page and bound with metal binding rings and voila - Our very own, personalised alphabet book!

Playful, Purposeful Writing

With so many boys in my class the girls interest in fairies  was bound to be translated into something a little more manly at some stage. When S rushed in from the playground to tell us that she saw two little eyes peeping out from underneath our classroom my kids immediately started hypothesising what it could be.  We brainstormed our ideas and then the children who were interested in doing so drew what they thought could be under our class.

I often ask children to draw their ideas as I find it helps them to verbalise their thoughts more fully and use more descriptive language when communicating their ideas. Recording what they say about their drawings also provides the perfect opportunity for modelling the writing process in a meaningful way.  

Later that day, during playtime, I heard my children chatting excitedly about what could be under the classroom as they peered under. This had really sparked their interest!

Th next day we received a letter from a Gnome called Norman, currently residing underneath our room,  and this provided the catalyst for more spontaneous, purposeful writing...

Letters were exchanged back and forth for quite some time, a number of houses were built for Norman  and the children were engaged in:

Representing their ideas verbally and visually and modelled and independent writing experiences that were meaningful to them.

Something A Little Bit Magical

It all started when a small group of girls were dancing and fluttering about the playground, spinning around in graceful circles and flapping their 'wings'. They were playing fairies. I jumped upon the chance to extend their play and later gathered the girls together to find out all about fairies. After much discussion we concluded that we would make two fairy gardens (because fairies love beautiful gardens) - one for the real fairies on our deck outside and one for themselves in home corner so that they might play fairies.

The girls had lots of ideas about what a fairy garden should look like so I asked them to draw their ideas:

Once we had finished we looked at our drawings and I asked "What do all your drawings have in common?" We noted that everyone had drawn flowers, mushrooms and fairy ponds and so we made sure our fairy garden had these three things.

We started with the outdoor garden:

We then read a range of fairy stories that the girls had bought from home and used the illustrations for inspiration when decorating our home corner. We made flowers, butterflies and a fairy pond filled with blue and green glass pebbles - a beautiful garden in which the children could role play and imagine themselves as fairies.

Throughout this project the children were engaged in collaborative decision making and problem solving. They had the opportunity to practice the skills of negotiation, speaking and listening in a group situation and valuing the ideas of others all the while, stimulating their imagination and having a great deal of fun!

"Creative play is likea spring that bubbles up from deep within a child. It is refreshing and enlivening. It is a natural part of the make-up of every healthy child. The child’s love of learning is intimately linked with a zest for play. Whether children are working on new physical skills, social relations, or cognitive content, they approach life with a playful spirit."

- Joan Almon 

Creative Collages

My kids love to collage so we decided to create two large collages to hang on the wall of our art area.

I  cut the two largest flaps off the top of a large cardboard box, put out some PVA glue and told the kids to go for it. They were in collage heaven! They glued bottle tops, shells, small pebbles, buttons, feathers, pie tins, cellophane, alfoil, beads, pom poms, patty pans, pipe cleaners and anything else they could find onto the two cardboard panels. The children continued to work on this over a few days, returning to the art table to stick on something interesting they had found. At the end of the week when it seemed we couldn't stick anything else on, we started adding paint. In the style of Jackson Pollock, the children drizzled, dripped, splatted and swirled thick paint onto the collage panels using teaspoons (an activity thoroughly enjoyed by all).

Inspired By Casa Maria's Creative Learning Zone - a treasure trove of art ideas for kids.

New Possibilities

Well Term Two is officially over and I can't believe that we are half way through the year! How the time has flown! When I told my kids this afternoon that we would be going on holidays for two weeks, J said that that made him want to cry because he loves coming to school! :) So we quickly started making plans for all the fun things we would do when we got back.

Here are some of the things the children said they would like to investigate next term:

Dinosaur bones and the different types of dinosaurs
Crocodiles
Snakes and animals... but snakes first
Interesting bits of nature
What is inside our bodies
Scarecrows
Princesses, barbies and mermaids
Growing plants (C recently bought in some sprouting carrot tops from home that the children were very interested in)

We all left at the end of today bubbling with ideas and feeling excited about all the possibilities for learning that lie ahead of us- a fantastic way to end the term!


I can't wait to get started!