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gfc will have a basket of free sidewalk chalk out on sunny days for as long as the supply lasts!

#weareallinthistogether

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Setting Up Shop: Reducing hot water to children's sink

Next week it will become official: I will be a licensed family child care provider! So that means this week is when I run around like crazy checking, rechecking, asking others to check, then checking again everything I have to prepare. Today I finished a project that was pretty easy after I figured out the mechanics involved. One regulation in our state for family child care is that the water temperature in sinks/baths/etc cannot exceed 120 degrees. Most homes, including mine, have the water heater set at a higher temp (around 140F). I didn't want to reduce the temperature for the entire house. After some research, trial and error, and a completely unhelpful and degrading manager at a big box store that starts with L and rhymes with "toes," I was able to put in a system that reliably lowers the hot water temperature on the sink. My Supplies (not pictured: a wrench, plumbing tape) From Home Depot: Two Ice Maker Connector Reinforced PVC, 1/4" Compressi...

Tips for tots: emotional awareness

Today we began to explore emotional awareness. For preschoolers, identifying emotions can be difficult. Keeping it simple and finding ways to make it concrete help them to become aware. We did two things today. First, I added a "feelings check" to our circle time. I need to add a feelings chart to my classroom space, but for a first time around it went okay without one. To do the feeling check, we did it as our circle time greeting. It basically goes like this: person 1: Hi, person 2. How are you feeling today? person 2: Hi person 1. I feel _____. person 1: Thank you for telling me. I structure it this way so that children get to practice greeting someone appropriately, taking turns in a conversation, and acknowledging that you are listening to what the other person is saying. If your students are ready, then you can have them add a causal statement to their feeling sentence: "I feel ____, because _____." The second thing we did was create a fe...

Activity: Alphabet Freeze Dance

If you haven't picked up on it, I am highly biased towards children learning through active, engaging play. That includes learning basic academic skills often included in pre-school curriculum. Most of my students are 2 years old, which means we aren't doing a lot of sitting and writing. We are building letters with blocks, finding letters in our names, matching friend's names to their photos, and learning songs with alliteration and sign language. We use all kinds of art and crafting techniques to design letters. One activity the children seem to enjoy is finding letters in the grass. For one of my son's birthday parties, I bought construction spray paint for games in the yard. It stays on for around 2-3 weeks and is easy to apply. They mostly request that I write their names, which works because that is the main focus of our alphabet studies. We start our letter provocations by focusing on letters with horizontal and vertical lines. I do...

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