Preschool - Judy Imamudeen

Community, BIG and small

By Judy Imamudeen | January 14, 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

On my teaching evaluation a few years ago I got a recommendation to do community service projects with my kids. Truthfully I kind of dismissed it–I teach 3-5 years, for goodness sake–how am I supposed to do authentic community service with egocentric little ones?!! It’s taken me a while to really take on this challenge to develop the spirit of community service into practice. However, little children can be so incredibly kind hearted and caring naturally, I have come to the understanding that I really need to think about how I can bridge this sweetness into a larger view: the Community.

Well, this past unit seemed to be the perfect impetus for this. Our central idea was: People can help our communities by working in different ways. One of the key concepts that we were working on was responsibility, so I really wanted the kids to understand that no matter what age or ability level, we can be helpers in a community. Secondly, we were exploring the attitude of appreciation, so I wanted them to demonstrate ways that we can say “thank you” to others for their help. These 2 learning intentions solidified into a final project, in which our little classroom community came up with a way to say “thank you” to helpers in the larger community.

After much reflection and class discussion, we decided that firefighters have a really tough and dangerous job. Since it was around Christmas, we thought cookies would be a sweet treat that they would like; also, I knew it would be a selfless act to give away something that they really wanted for themselves (cookies!) to another person which would teach what it means to be of service. We also made a card with a special message to our everyday heroes.

I was really surprised that the kids didn’t complain about not tasting the cookies, and they really enjoyed making them. When we visited the fire station to deliver the cookies, we dressed up in some festive Christmas hats to spread some holiday cheer. Originally, it had been my intention to just drop off the cookies and say thank you, but the firemen would have none of that–they had to give us a proper tour of the station. Although I am not posting all of the pictures of the trip, they really went far beyond our expectations of a field trip to their station. They took us through their training courses, putting on uniforms, climbing ladders and let the kids try to operate their tools. It was awesome! Everyone really got to appreciate how hard they have to work to do their job.

Students present a card and Christmas cookies to them.

We wrote our message in Mandarin and “signed” our names with our hands.

J.P. gives them all high fives before we leave.

After the “day in the life” of a firefighter, we gave them our present of cookies and our cards. It was an incredible experience. I hope this first experience of a community service project helps to develop the concept of giving, in which, when we give from the heart, we always get more than we give.

Coding in the Early Years

By Judy Imamudeen | December 19, 2015 | Comments 0 Comment

Well I am back in the Early Years until one of our teachers returns from maternity leave. It’s been an interesting shift back since this is a mixed classroom, with 3-5 year olds. I decided to incorporate coding as a part of our math language development, with a focus on positional words.

I’ve had to do a lot of songs and games to get my ELLs familiar with all of this language. They really loved this video from Scratch Garden: Left and Right Song. Then we started talking about how we might do programming in the real world with giving directions to one of our “robot” friends. In our introductory activity, a friend had to get to the telephone, so students would take turns to “program”them with the directions they needed.

Emily counts her steps to the telephone.

Anuja thinks about how he might “program” Emily.

There was a lot of discussion about how to walk to the telephone- you can walk “this way, then that way”. As a result of eliminating confusion and focusing on the positional language ( in this case, right/left/backwards/forwards), we took away some of the foam mats so the path looked more obvious ( and it mimicked more for using the BeeBot- which is where we were heading). Something great about using the mats was that the kids could really see the one-to-one correspondence that they needed to grasp for programming. However, this activity did have some limitations because they couldn’t understand how a code might need to be cancelled if something changed in the program.

However, this was their first step and had more success in this way as the students began to get the concepts. This paved the way with using the BeeBot. We only have one in our class, so I used it as a center/station activity. We practiced looking at the symbols on the BeeBot and how we could use them and explored using it before setting up obstacles or using it in play scenarios.

Elena decides to link up a train to the Beebot

As their understanding progressed, we worked on the BeeBot and Foos apps on the iPads. Our tech integrator came in to assist during our school’s celebration of the Hour of Code. He was happy to see how some of the kids were progressing and helped me to assess where students were at in their learning journeys.