Emotions: How We Express Ourselves

This week in preschool we started our new inquiry block "How We Express Ourselves".  With preschoolers this starts of with discussing emotions and actions/reactions.  We read tons of stories like "The Way I Feel" and "Today I Feel Silly" to discuss the wide variety of emotions.  I love that "Inside Out" has been seen by many kids in the past year.  They have more vocabulary to describe the different emotions because of it.  We identified emotions all day long on Tuesday and then on Thursday we talked about what emotions look like on your body.  If you're happy you smile, if you're sad you may be quiet, if you're excited you may be jumping up and down.  We also talked about the possibility of changing a negative reaction (hitting, snatching, wailing, sulking) into a helpful reaction.  The idea that we have control over how we react is still being worked out within preschoolers.  I hope that our conversations this week have opened them up to a possibility of choosing a different reaction, though as an adult it is still hard for me personally to change a reaction. One small step at a time, I suppose.

The first couple of weeks of December will also be spent reviewing the 4 basic coins, their value and their identifying characteristics.  On Tuesday we talked about pennies and shined our pennies in a salt and vinegar solution.  That's why my house was stinky when you picked up your kids :).  On Thursday we talked about the nickel.  We're also dilligently working through the Moffatt Girls Ready2Read program and reading our interest led reading books.

Thursday we pulled out the puppets and let the kids play with the puppets and the emotion bean bags together.  It turned into a silly game of very emotional puppets :).