Culture and Community: Teacher-Facilitated Exploration Station
Children will be introduced to the rules of their classroom community. Other cultures will be introduced by exploring various families and cultures the new preschool community.
Ideas:
- Have the children bring in pictures of their families and create a bulletin board featuring them.
- Provide books in the Book Nook or Culture station that are about families around the world.
- Invite children to share a family tradition for "show and tell".
- Invite Grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc. to visit and share something interesting about their family.
- Create a Peace station for children to go to when they need a space to resolve an issue. The teacher will need to join them and help to moderate the conversation and help them to resolve the issue. One idea is to have a flower and the child holding the flower shares their feelings, frustrations and then asked the other child to ........ share, be kind, etc. Then they pass the flower to the other child and the other child needs to acknowledge the other child's feelings and then share how they can make things better with their behavior. When they are done, they can hug and go back to playing.
- Create a Calm down station. Provide a place where children can go to take a break from the activities in the classroom, the noise, the other children, etc. Maybe a corner in the room and add soft pillows, a basket with a calm down jar, squishy toys, small stuffed animal, small weighted blanket, smelly jar with lavender (cotton ball with lavender oil), books, etc. Add a sand timer (2 min) so they know they need to try to be ready to go back when the timer is up.
- Have a Potluck lunch where the children bring in their favorite cultural food to share.