Thursday, June 25, 2009

Assignment #6 June 25, 2009: Toddler Lesson Plan

*Disclaimer*
I had a lot of trouble trying to format this post. Sorry it is all over the place. I cannot figure out what is wrong with the formatting. Let me know if anyone has questions about it because I have the files in word where they can be read perfectly.
Sorry again:-(

Rationale:
Our child care center is part of a campaign to encourage parents to “tune out of the television and to tune into their children” through a program called MediaWise through the National Institute on Media and the Family. Because of this we do not use television under any circumstances in our classrooms and we limit computer use to programs with specific goals that meet Creative Curriculum objectives. However, many of our children take great interest in many popular television programs they see outside of school. One accreditation criteria for our center is that we incorporate children’s interests in our daily lesson planning. A way to incorporate popular media that children are exposed to on television in a way that meets Creative Curriculum and MediaWise expectations is to take themes and activities from these shows and create meaningful and quality experiences with them in the different interest areas. This lesson plan incorporates two very popular television shows geared towards toddler and preschool age children, “Dora the Explorer” and “Go, Diego, Go”. Large pictures of these characters and books about these characters help to initially engage the children while activities that these characters may engage in help to extend these interests into learning experiences while meeting critical learning objectives.



Theme: Exploring like Diego and Dora
Classroom: La Crèche Appletree Toddlers
Monday
Daily Topic: Who is Diego?
Language Arts: “Go Diego, Go”
Music “Rescue Pack”
-Use drums while singing
Large Muscle: Swinging on monkey bars like Diego swings on the zipcord
Practical Life/Experiments: Dress-up like we are going on an exploring adventure Manipulatives/Math: Stringing yarn through our paper plate masks
Arts & Crafts: Paper plate Baby Jaguar masks
Sensory: Giving Baby Jaguar a bath in the sensory table
Tuesday
Daily Topic: What does Diego do?
Language Arts: “Diego saves the Manatee”
Music: Mùsica Festival
Large Muscle: Climbing large muscle equipment saying, “Zuben”
Practical Life/Experiments: Sink/Float
-experimenting with various things found in the sea
Manipulatives/Math: Big/Little- Discuss sizes of sea creatures
Arts & Crafts: Decorating manatees with tissue paper
Sensory: Sinking and floating sea creatures
Wednesday
Daily Topic: Who is Dora?
Language Arts: “Dora the Explorer”
Music: “Come on Vamanos”
-use musical instruments
Large Muscle: Walk around the neighborhood like Dora
Practical Life/Experiments: Putting on backpacks with things that we will need on our walk, pretending we are Dora and Boots
Manipulatives/Math: “Count with Dora” -Use play fruit with counting book
Arts & Crafts: Free Art -provide children with cotton balls, yarn, glue, crayons, scrap paper, and pencils
Sensory: Play-doh -Molding fruit free hand and with cookie cutters
Thursday
Daily Topic: What does Dora Do?
Language Arts: “Dora’s First Trip”
Music: “Hola, Hola, Hello, Hello”
Large Muscle: Pedaling our bikes “màs rapido”
Practical Life/Experiments: Fast and Slow-watch as some items fall fast (bouncy balls) and some fall slow (feathers)
Manipulatives/Math: Matching pictures of interest areas on our maps
Arts & Crafts: Classroom Map -Gluing pictures of our favorite interest area on the map
Sensory: Shaving cream -Tracing map paths
Friday
Field Trip to the Minnesota Zoo where we can practice “rescuing” animals like Diego and exploring like Dora*As always, Parent volunteers are welcomed and encouraged to join us!

Rationale:
Along with taking children’s interests into consideration when creating lesson plans, it is also important that we are incorporating parents’ requests and wishes for their children as well, especially for infants, when going through daily activities and routines with our children. A recent trend in popular media has been the boom in “educational” videos such as Baby Einstein. We have had several parents request that we show such educational videos to our children such as these. However, due to our policy against televisions, we cannot show them. Further, a more effective manner of teaching the information that the videos set out to teach is through hands on experiences with our children. Taking the same information presented in the videos and creating real life learning experiences with our children can be effective in both following through with parents’ requests as well as meeting our Creative Curriculum learning objectives.


Theme: Baby Einstein Come to Life!
Classroom: La Crèche Appletree Infants/Mobile Infants
Monday
Language Development: “Baby Einstein’s Baby’s First Places-Around Town”-Name interest areas in classroom and places around neighborhood on a walk
Creative Activity: Mobile Infants: Painting rooms in a house to use as flash cards in call-response format
Physical Development: Move around classroom in various ways while teacher in call response format names interest areas visited. -Tummy time, crawl/scoot, stand, walk
Learning from the World: “Baby Einstein’s Touch and Feel Wild Animals”-Discuss the different textures in the sensory book
Tuesday
Language Development: “Baby Einstein’s Lullaby Time”-Nap time/ Quiet time singing or humming along with the CD
Creative Activity: Free Art: Mobile Infants: Practicing with paint brushes on the easel Infant A: Finger painting
Physical Development: Tummy Time:-encourage children to lift their heads to look at/reach for Baby Einstein materials inform of them.
Learning from the World: Finger Painting: Feeling the squishy and cold paint between our fingers
Wednesday
Language Development: “Baby Einstein’s First Orchestra-Musical Instruments”
Creative Activity: Baby Room Orchestra-encourage all of the children to play musical instruments to the Baby Einstein CD
Physical Development: Dance Party!-Practice moving our bodies in response to stimuli-Sway to soft music, bounce to upbeat music, etc…
Learning from the World: Cause/Effect table toys-explain what happens as children play with them.Ex) “the puppy popped up when you pushed the button”…
Thursday
Language Development: “Baby Einstein’s Water Water Everywhere!”
Creative Activity: Group Project: Finger painting blue on large paper to use as water background
Physical Development: “Standie-ups”-encourage children to pull up on the sensory table to see the water.
Learning from the World: Water in the sensory table: Mobile Infants: Stand up tableInfant A: Sensory buckets
Friday
Language Development: “Baby Einstein’s Baby’s First Sounds”
Creative Activity: Walk around the neighborhood listening for various different sounds-Puppies, kittens, cars, music, birds, the wind…
Physical Development: Making sounds with our bodies-Encourage children to clap their hands, stomp their feet and tap on their thighs by copying their teacher and each other.
Learning from the World: Sound tools:-Name the different sounds that the infants hear around the center and around the neighborhood.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Alycia,
    I was really happy to see that you used Dora and Diego in your lesson! As a Spanish teacher and former Latin American Studies major, I appreciate the use of Spanish and positive Latino characters in all classrooms, but especially when I see them in non-Spanish classrooms! Too often, Latinos are left out of the picture entirely and even when they are included in pop culture (or curricula for that matter) they are portrayed as silly sidekicks. Dora and Diego are really positive characters and certainly one of a kind! I also enjoyed that your lessons were geared at younger children. I have been designing my lesson plans for older students because that is the age group that I am most familiar with, but also because the pop culture and music about which I am most knowledgeable is also at an older level, theme-wise. It’s good to be reminded that younger students can benefit from pop-culture in the classroom too!
    -Leyah

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  2. Hello. I enjoyed your post and lessons. Good job being creative to work within the parameters for your job. I saw one of the creators of Dora speak at a staff development seminar for my school district. It was interesting how much research was put into creating that show. It sounded like the creators were thinking about the messages received by viewers from many points of view.

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