Homes, Day 1

Tuesday, Jan. 17 we talked about houses, specifically different kinds of "people" houses. I showed the students pictures of different houses from around the world, everything from a high rise apartment home, to a hut in Belize, and a house on stilts. We talked about some of the different things that these homes had, like the number of bedrooms, where the bathroom might be, etc...

Then I gave each child a blank piece of paper and told them to draw their dream house. I had shown them a picture of a house in Arizona that had a pool in their backyard, and apparently lots of students thought that was pretty cool, so you can see that lots of these drawings have a pool. Treehouses were another common theme.

My favorite part of these pictures is the stories they tell about it. "Treehouse with 3 windows, but don't get in here because there's spiders." "This is my mom and me on top of our castle." Children are natural storytellers.

That day we also started learning about number 2. I am really trying to help the children learn that "nothing" has a number--it's zero. So I had each child come up to the front and hold their empty hands out. Then I said, "How many is in (child)'s hand?" At first they usually said, "none" but then they started to catch on. Then we went on. We have also been counting to 30 everyday. We clap each time we count, to help them get used to the one-to-one correspondence.