Some Snippets from the Week

10/7/2022

Our Flow of the Day: Creating a Visual Schedule

"Is it time to go home?" -Henri

"It tells us what day it is," says Henri in response to the question what is a calendar. Have you heard the word schedule? "No," reply the children unanimously. The sound of the bell, signals time, and the children are picking up on this. However, what time of day the bell indicates remains unclear, and this has prompted an intention to make a visual schedule to help us grasp the flow of each school day.

"It (a calendar) has numbers and shapes and ... you choose a number...that's birthday." -Lou Lou

Inquiring about the flow of the day, George provides an accurate, day-dependent, reply (Mondays and Wednesdays are the only two days that we end our day outside):

"First mommy and daddy drop me here, next they leave, next we make a message, next we clean up, next morning meeting, next go to studio, next go to snack, next go outside after snack, next we go home after we play outside."
-George

To kick off our work we focused on the event and block of time that is our Morning Meeting. We approached this through drawing morning meeting in a small group setting. Most of the children emphasized the morning meeting configuration by moving around their black, felt-tip markers in circular motions, representational of our morning meeting rug. Zoe (bottom right) also illustratively indicates the people around the rug (in color) where some of the other children werevdepicting people sitting around the rug with dots.

Lou Lou draws a representation of Morning Meeting for the development of a Visual Flow of the Day.

Developing the idea of representing morning meeting, with our circular rug and everyone sitting around its edge, we chose to invite Lou Lou to start again, extending and slowing down on her previous idea. By slowing down and extending the work, Lou Lou effectively drew more people like images around the large circle. Our with this continues...