Silverwood Park - Samantha Longley and Cora Williams - residency - 2 hours
Back at Silverwood this week! It’s the start of the Green Beans program. This is Silverwoods preschool program. Children age 1-5 are with an adult for an hour long session. The format is first exploration time, reading time, a movement activity, art time, and the outdoors time. For the first week we were talking about spring and seeds. We played with seeds and did colouring of seed life cycle drawings for explore time. We read a book about seeds called A Seed is Sleepy. We did Seed Yoga where we pretended to be seeds sprouting into plants. We made a seed mosaic for our art activity and went on a short hike to find seeds like acorns out in the park.
It was a really fun day. It goes by super quickly. As someone who is a little nervous trying to wrangle a room full of ten preschoolers, it’s a big help having an adult with each child. We have the schedule on the board so everyone knows what we’re doing that day. Kids come in and happily engage in explore time without having to be told to. Once everyone has explore the room, we sat down on the rug to read the story. Before starting, we all introduced ourselves, teachers, adults and kids.
The seed mosaic was first demonstrated while everyone was still on the rug. Then everyone took a seat at the tables and got their materials. It was a simple project with only a few steps. The final step was to coat the mosaic with glue to ensure the seeds would stick. This was the only step that really required adult help. We had a full classroom, which was 10 kids.
I really like the structure of Green Beans. The same format is followed for DoodleBugs, the next age group up. I will be with both DoodleBugs and Green Beans this month in the mornings. My teaching will be at the end of April - one session with DoodleBugs on ladybugs and one session with Green Beans about rainbows.
