Welcome! I am passionate about excellence in early childhood education. I do a mainly Reggio inspired child-led/ teacher-facilitated/ play-based intensive preschool curriculum. Aspects of Montessori and other programs are sprinkled throughout as well. My graduates are all at the top of their classes and many are in gifted programs. I homeschooled my two boys for l3 years for academic reasons.
I have a master's degree in Human Resources (training and development,) and college courses in Early Childhood Education and Development, along with my 120 hour Child Development Associate training.
One of my clients has a doctorate in Early Childhood Education and Special Education, so I always have her expertise to tap into as well.
I welcome questions and comments.
On FB I post links for crafts, freebies, and articles related to brain research, learning research, parenting and childcare; along with a lot more about our every day activities.
170+ Pinterest boards with 20,000+ pins arranged by theme. Over 8000 followers.
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My printables for sale. Many free items.
My YouTube station with channels for what I consider to be the best preschool learning songs and preschool stories.
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[Amazon Affiliate widget, so may need to disable Adblocker to view.] We also used the book The Egg, a First Discovery Book by Scholastic that I LOVE. It has a 5 star rating as well, for good reason.
It has transparent pages that show the development of the embryo inside the egg. This book also shows how eggs develop in the hen and introduces the different animals that lay eggs. It's not as thorough in that aspect as An Egg is Quiet or Chickens Aren't the Only Ones, but I like this one for an introduction and a discussion about eggs, leading the next day into a more thorough discussion on the different animals that lay eggs. Our chickies left for the farm this morning. We already miss them. The children got a few last cuddles in and said goodbye. Tags: egg, preschool, daycare, childcare, theme, unit, Easter, spring, dinosaur, reptile, pre-k, prek, kindergarten
Eggs is the theme this month. We've been pretty busy. The incubator was set up and loaded with a dozen eggs from my mom's buff orpingtons on 3/27/12 and we started the count down. Here is my printable for that.
Given 21 days to hatching, I anticipated on seeing some action by Saturday, but nada.
We got to the house on Sunday, 4/15 at 7pm and saw this...
Then at 9pm we heard some cheeping, and found this...
so we totally missed the actual hatching. Another was making it's way out as of 11pm. That one was out the next morning, Monday, and the children and I watched two more emerge. Here is a video of #5... and 5 more were already showing signs of hatching.
7 were out by the time we left Monday evening, and 11 greeted us Tuesday morning. We went ahead and moved them into their new, temporary, home Tuesday afternoon.
The children LOVED being able to pet them and watch them take their first pecks at food and water before closing them up with the heating lamp. The container is on the counter at perfect kid-viewing height so they can observe them as much as they want. They've been checking them out regularly. I'll open them up for more petting and closer observation this afternoon and tomorrow before they head to the farm on Friday.
SKILLS:
Science lifecycle, incubation, incubation needs, humidity, evaporation, heat concepts, chick care, chick physiology, thermometer reading and temperature of environment in incubator and different areas of holding bin, observation, food chain
Math 21 days to hatch, counting chicks, counting legs/beaks/wings, measuring chicks, measuring the water they drink, thermometer reading
Language incubation, incubator, humidity, evaporation, discussions and observations, gentle touch, concepts of little and baby
Starting off posts regarding our egg unit we've been working on for a while... Today we took the incubating eggs off the automatic turner in preparation of hatching.
The center eggs were old ones, so after 18 days in the incubator as heat indicators, they are good and rotten. PERFECT for our sink or float experiment.
I asked the children if they thought the new egg, straight out of the carton and white, would sink or float. We discussed it, and the concepts of sink and float, with the sinkers and floaters votes equally divided. Even the 2s had opinions on this. Then we discussed the yucky old egg and what it might do.
It did help that they were different colors for the children to be able to easily see which one was which. Then the older girls placed each one in water and we saw what happened.
We observed the air bubbles coming off the eggs and discussed why that was.
I asked if they wanted to smash the yucky old egg and smell it's stinkiness, but they declined. They trusted me on that one.
SKILLS:
Science density, gases, air, rotting, water displacement, volume, floating vs sinking, prediction, deduction, hypothesis, classification [old/new, sinker/floater]
Math graphing, counting, one-to-one correspondence [glasses to eggs to children who put them in], prediction, deduction, classification [old/new, sinker/floater], shapes: oval, cylinder [tumbler], rectangle [tray], circle [tops of tumblers]
Language vocabulary, adjectives, placement words, colors, explaining their vote
Observation
Tags: preschool, childcare, daycare, pre-k, prek, kindergarten, homeschool, eggs, egg theme, egg unit, Easter, float sink, science, spring
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