My Favorite Things Quilt Fosters celebration of each child's uniqueness! Social and Emotional: 7. Self-Identity
Materials: Crayons, Markers, Colored Pencils, Tape, and Construction Paper
Age Group: 4-5 years old
Beginning: Read "I Had a Favorite Dress" by Boni Ashburn.
Earlier: Discuss the students favorite things to do, hang it up around the classroom.
Middle: Discuss their favorite thing to do or what makes them happy, and have them draw it on their square of construction paper. Each small group tape them together and have all groups bring them together on the carpet to tape again and share.
Later: Draw their favorite thing about their friend in the classroom and how/why they are friends.
End: The activity ends after scraps have been cleaned, the quilt has been made, and everyone got to share their favorite things.
Follow-up Ideas: Write in journals a sentence that explains the picture they drew. Also depending on the students favorite things make them come to life in the classroom and do them. Ex. Favorite thing is to play soccer, play soccer outside or in the gym.
Marshmallow Tower Teaching the children what it means to work together. Social and Emotional Development: 12. Building Relationships
Materials: Mini Marshmallows and Toothpicks
Beginning: Read "Do You Want to Be My Friend?" by Eric Carle.
Earlier: Making different shapes by sticking toothpicks in the marshmallows.
Middle: Talk about working with friends and what teamwork means. Build towers as a table or group using toothpicks in marshmallows. Talk about how they're each a tower but all look different. Discuss whether it was easy or hard doing it as a team.
Later: Build bridges together using toothpicks in marshmallows, and the experiment the amount of items (weight) each one can hold.
End: The activity comes to a close after towers are built, displayed around the room, marshmallows are eaten, and clean-up has begun.
Follow-up Ideas: Discuss other things around the room that can be built together and encourage teamwork, like lego/diplo towers. Another activity would be how high students can go with their towers.
Review of Activity: 1. Discoveries children made were that marshmallows are sticky and sometimes it's nice to have two setoff hands working together. 2. Children responded by seeing who could build the tallest tower. 3. The activity accomplished what was desired by creating a culture of children working teams towards a common goal. (fostering friendships) 4. Children were involved by using mini marshmallows to create any figure they desired. 5. The activity was appropriate for this age group because they were able to discover the value in teamwork. 6. Students can improve on this activity by making it more challenging, experimenting with how much weight each figure can hold. 7. Students expressed confidence in having the highest tower. 8. The time allotted for the activity ws appropriate, as later on children had the opportunity to go back and play with their towers.
Bottled Up & Gloomy The objective is to identify feelings and emotions. Social and Emotional Development: 9. Emotions
Materials: Mini water bottles, water, soap, and food coloring
Beginning: Read "I Feel Silly" by Jamie Lee Curtis.
Earlier: Draw how they are feeling today, share, and hang around classroom.
Middle: Discuss what feelings are, what it means to feel, and what makes us feel that way. Then individually create a feeling bottle, putting all ingredients into each water bottle. Colors vary based on which feeling the student is displaying. The children can come up with which color means what, i.e yellow is happy. Shake bottles, and share the feeling the chose.
Later: Talk about more in depth emotions, like to be confused, jealous, or feel guilty.
End: The activity ends as the classroom gets clean and each student has a feeling bottle.
Follow-up Ideas: Discuss what the children can do when they feel a certain way and what they shouldn't do. Also talk about taking their feeling bottle with them during those times they need to visit the be by myself area and use shaking it to sooth.