Making Friends

We have started our September unit, Friends and Feelings.  During circle time I had the girls look at each other and list off the attributes that were the same while I pointed out things that were different.  There is a great episode of Daniel Tiger on this very concept if you're looking for a fun media supplement.

The girls enjoyed learning how to say hello in different languages.  I think I will make this a part of our circle time from now on and maybe look up "goodbye" in the corresponding languages so we can use them both.  We played the matching game by first handing a card to each girl and placing the rest face down on the floor.  I turned their name tags over and picked one to decide who got to go first (I will be doing this from now on, it worked really well) and then let that girl turn over one card.  If it matched her card, she got to keep it and pick another card to match on her next turn.  If it didn't match, she turned it over and kept the original card.  It actually went pretty well.  Littlest even had a card to match but her attention span conked out before her second turn, which was fine.

Making the friend puppets was a huge highlight.  They named them after themselves at first, although Miss M later changed hers to Elsa Tiger.  Littlest liked playing with the feathers and glue and scribbling on paper but otherwise wasn't much interested in the puppet itself.  The older girls zoomed around the downstairs, rescuing each other while I cleaned up the art supplies and set up the bus sorting game.  The puppets were then used to help the buses get to their appropriate stations at the store, church, library, museum and park.

Littlest has lots of fun putting things away so after the girls finished sorting the buses appropriately, I let them zoom around some more and focused on labeling the bus colors while Littlest put them in the container.  We then dumped the container and sorted them together.  It took a lot of modeling but she did get the concept after a while.  With Miss M attending a three hour playgroup on Fridays now, I see a great opportunity to use my MGT materials with Littlest (which she will love having unfettered access to with her sister gone).

It was a really successful beginning of a new unit.  I think the focus on labeling emotions and interacting with friends will be great for Miss M as she meets new children in the playgroup and encounters opportunities to express how she is feeling in an appropriate way.