Valuing the Individual

The bulletin boards in my classroom no longer have the same work done by individual children. Instead it had different work done by individual children. It shows the value of the individual. It shows that each child has different strengths and interests. It shows a child's thinking through their recordings of what they have said about different topics. It included photos with captions and drawings with captions. There are pictures without captions. And there are recordings of children's thoughts without pictures.

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Tape Man

Some of the children put blue tape over their mouth. Usually I would have said something like, "Take the tape off your mouth. It's not for putting on your mouth." Instead I thought of Tape Man (with some pride, being from New Zealand). I thought of creativity. I thought of art. So we sat together for whole group time, some with tape on their mouth. I said, "I've got something to show you." When they first say him one of them said, "It's scary." I reassured them that it's not too scary and that he's being funny. So they started to laugh. Pretty soon there was no more tape on mouths (not that I minded if there was, it's just hard to laugh). Thank you Tape Man for reminding us that creativity begins with exploration in play.

Journals & Writing

We like to write about what interests us. It's the same for children. Journal writing time is an invitation for the children to draw something of interest to them. They tell me something about their pictures and I write it on the page. They see how writing happens by starting with an idea then seeing it get written down.

Yarn Trap

The yarn was used to make a trap. It was tied to a picture frame and a basket. Each was positioned on shelves across from one another. The children had to go "under" the trap to get to the carpet for whole class time. There was a lot of sharing of ideas, problem solving, and use of the positional language "over" and "under" and "around".

NZ Teacher

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