Dilly Days with Beth and Joellyn: Authors of The InvestiGator Club™ for Robert-Leslie Publishing

Just check out the fun Beth and I had with the InvestiGator Club team and the Parent/Child Inc. Head Start staff in San Antonio, Texas. Over two weeks in August we trained nearly 600 wonderful, enthusiastic new members of the InvestiGator Club. Welcome to the clubhouse!

Between putting the final touches on our Spanish Instructional Materials Kit and developing our new web-based lesson planner and assessment record, I’m busy planning my keynote speech for “Taking a Closer Look at Concepts,” a regional convention at Tulsa Tech in Tulsa, Oklahoma on September 22. My topic is “bringing joy to the preschool classroom through social and emotional development.” What fun! Please share your ideas for bringing joy into the preschool classroom. We’d love to hear from you.

For more information about professional development offerings in Oklahoma, you can go to The Center for Early Childhood Professional Development.

As I reflect on yesterday’s experience, I take this away as advice for myself and for all those who love and work with young children:

• Provide good quality music. Kids know the difference between
  carefully crafted music and music that has not been well composed.
• Let children experience a variety of genres from many cultures.
• Offer classical music even after children reach school age. Pieces
  such as “Peter and the Wolf” spark imagination and provide knowledge
  of instruments including brass, strings, woodwinds, and percussion.
• Invite children to hear music for pure enjoyment as well as for
  specific purposes such as exercise or for remembering letters,
  numbers, and basic information.

Enjoy the rest of your summer! And be sure to include music when you
can!

It’s summer, and my neighborhood is buzzing with “eight and unders” manning lemonade stands, creating sidewalk chalk masterpieces, and chasing each other through sprinklers. Summer is magic. Yesterday’s magic was especially interesting though. Gathered on my front porch were no fewer than eight preschoolers and kindergarteners sampling music from a variety of CDs. Their CD player had a built-in microphone that was used as a karaoke prop for only the best of songs. And as I listened to the children give commentary, I noticed something quite interesting. These children knew what they liked—and they knew why! In their own way, these little ones articulated ideas about rhythm, beat, lyrical quality, and melody.

Being an author of a preschool curriculum that offers music, I was curious how our music would be perceived by the children on my porch (excluding my son who will be entering first grade and who knows all the songs by heart). Of the 16 tracks, the following songs were voted as the top three: “Gone Investigating,” “Over in the Meadow,” and “Bad Weather Blues.” There was even a tussle for the microphone about halfway through the blues song. Now that’s an endorsement!

Summer is finally here. Now, teachers and parents alike have to contend with the specters of learning regression and readiness for the next grade.

That’s why Beth and I developed a brand new program called Get Ready for Kindergarten. It’s not even in the Robert-Leslie catalog or on The InvestiGator Club’s website yet. We created this program to work in both school and home environments.

The children get to visit “Camp InvestiGator” and have fun learning as they pretend to go camping. The class even meets around an imaginary campfire to open and close every day! Here you see beautiful hand-print sandcastles made with a mixture of tan paint and real sand. Doesn’t Camp InvestiGator look like fun?

Today’s something is nice and simple. Please read all the way through for your smile and affirmation.

Okay, preschool experts, I’d love to hear what you think. Following are two opinions that I recently heard while enjoying some time with two friends who send their children to different preschools. With whom do you agree? Send us your comments—we’d love to know!

Christine, mother of 4, “Pro”
I am a strong believer in having a graduation ceremony for preschoolers who will enter kindergarten. It’s so much fun to see those little ones with caps, gowns and diplomas. These ceremonies help children feel pride in their accomplishments and help them look forward to upcoming school years.

Anne, mother of 2, “Con”
The only occasions for which we should reward children with graduation ceremonies are high school and college, when they’ve reached a major milestone and have worked for years to accomplish something. It seems that today children are rewarded too often for non-accomplishments—tasks that should be expected. Activities like preschool graduation ceremonies mislead children into thinking that they should be rewarded for almost anything.

In general, it seems that children usually have a fun time with it and are undeniably cute. But do the children get as much out of it as the rest of the family do?

Marion Hyson presents some good, practical techniques in her book The Emotional Development of Young Children.

1. Provide daily activities that prompt children to think about emotions. Promote pretend play. Share emotion-rich books. Weave creative arts throughout the curriculum.
2. Smile, look interested, look sad: Show your own feelings and mirror children’s own expressions of emotions. Engage babies in “imitation games.” Let children see that their own expressions influence others’ reactions.
3. Respond to what children are feeling. Tune in to children’s faces, bodies, and voices. Use this information to construct prompt, sensitive appropriate responses.
4. Name children’s feelings. Give words to what children experience emotionally. Connect the emotion labels that you use with children’s cultures.
5. Talk about the causes of feelings. Help children connect the way they feel with what made them feel that way. Use these conversations to build children’s ability to see others’ point of view.

In this post, a prekindergarten teacher talks about how she deals with strong emotions at the end of the year.

We all know that socialization is an important part of prekindergarten. But what are the actual coping skills that would result in an emotionally healthy child who is ready for kindergarten? These are some of the ones highlighted by Beth and Jo at the National Head Start Conference:

• Following rules, routines and directions
• Identifying feelings in oneself and others
• Controlling anger and impulses
• Problem Solving
• Suggesting play themes and activities to peers
• Sharing toys and other materials
• Taking turns
• Helping adults and peers
• Giving compliments
• Understanding how and when to apologize
• Expressing empathy with others’ feelings
• Recognizing that anger can interfere with problem solving
• Learning how to recognize anger in oneself and others
• Learning how to calm down
• Understanding appropriate ways to express anger

My last post listed some reasons why it is desirable to require prekindergarten teachers to have four-year college degrees. Here are some of the points of the opposition.

• Does a degree equal a quality teacher? Some researchers are not finding a causal relationship between a B.A. and classroom effectiveness.
• Degrees in early childhood education are still not readily available. It is not certain that Florida could attract enough teachers to be successful.
• Degree requirements will homogenize the prekindergarten world. Spanish-speaking teachers, ethnic diversity, and alternative philosophies, such as Montessori, may all become endangered should accreditation standards be put in place.
• Teachers with degrees command higher salaries. Existing centers and private programs may have to close because they cannot compete.