Pre-K 411 @ William H. Ray School; Teacher: Jeffrey Gillespie

The final tally, including teachers votes, was Barack Obama 16 votes and John McCain 7 votes.  Check out the pictures of 411 election day here.  The children were very thoughtful about who they were going to vote for, especially when they were in that voting booth.  If you notice in a few of those pictures you get a good look at the children studying the candidate favorites posters and making a decision based on the ‘issues’ that meant the most to them.  The children seem to be coming to an understanding about the thought processes behind making a choice and developing their Theory of Mind.  A lot of people were very suprised that McCain received 8 votes, especially considering where are school is located so close to the Obama’s, but the John McCain in our classroom is much different than the John McCain in the world.  His favorite song “Sweet Caroline” by Neil Diamond is now the favorite song in the classroom.  You have not seen nothing yet until you see a classroom full of 3-4-5 year olds rocking out to Neil Diamond  : )  So, it was a very interesting experience for me and I am very excited about the position this process has left us with and where we can take it from here. 

Coming up we are going to continue to use choice/voting to help us make decisions in the classroom including ways to regulate our emotions.  More to come : )

Also,  I am waiting on pics from the field trip to the Emerald City Theater, I forgot to bring our camera.  The play went pretty well and the children seemed to have a good time, I will post the pictures as soon as I get them.  We are also considering going to another play there later in the year, ‘Hansel & Gretel’, Whaddya think?

If you have any questions/comments/funny conversations to share about the election process or the field trip, please shoot me an email or leave a comment here. Thanks.

Check out the pics of us getting ready for Halloween here and celebrating at our Halloween Party here.

Check out pics taken by the kids here.

We have also begun to really gear up for the election tomorrow.  We had a discussion about the ‘issues’ that both John McCain and Barack Obama stand for.  Now these are tax and education issues but rather favorites of the two candidates to help the children make the most ‘informed’ choice possible for president  : )  Here are our issues we are considering:

Barack Obama Favorites:

Favorite Song:  Marvin Gaye - ‘What’s going on?’

Favorite Movie:  Shrek the Third

Favorite Superhero:  Spiderman

Favorite Cookies:  Shortbread

Favortire Food:  Mexican - Nachos with the cheese sauce on the side

John McCain Favorites

Favorite Song:  Neil Diamond - ‘Sweet Caroline’

Favorite Movie:  Indiana Jones and the Kinddom of the Crystal Skull

Favorite Superhero:  Batman

Favorite Cookies:  Oatmeal Raisen

Favortire Food:  Mexican - Nachos - cheese sauce on the chips

We sampled the favorites of each candidate and tomorrow we will continue discussing these ‘issues’ and what happens when you like something from a candidate you are not voting for.  Check out the pictures here.  I am also hoping that the polling lines here at Ray will not be too long as I would like to take the kids into to see the voting process.  In the midst of all that we will also be continuing to create our own polling booth and will vote after lunch time to be counted on Wednesday.  Should be fun!

So Nyah’s(child next door) father Terrence, who is a professional violin player, came in and did a presentation on his career.  He introduced the children to the violin, viola, and the cello.  Terrence said that he was not able to bring in the bass, which would have completed the string family, because it was much too large.  He had the children compare what each instrument looked like and sounded like.  Then he played the violin while the children sang songs like, Twinkle Twinkle and Old MacDonald.  Check out the pictures here!  A big thanks to Miles who was our photographer for the event!

This week we began learning about and using Tally Marks.  We talked about how Tally marks are used to represent a piece of information that you are working on.  They could be used to represent how many of a certain item you have or as an indicator or vote when making a choice.  We practiced making tally marks in small groups and using one to one correspondence to figure out how many tally marks we needed.  The children also noticed about the size of a tally mark, too long and they got in the way of others marks and tallys too short were hard to count.  Along with tally marks the children, spear-headed by Ethan, began talking about and noticing all the fire alarms and fire pulls around the classroom and in the hallways.  So, over the past few days we have broken up into small groups before naptime and taken Tally Walks around the corridors searching out first fire alarms then fire pulls.  The children had clipboards and markers and whenever they found what they were looking for they made a tally.  They were so excited about our Tally walk that we will continue next week looking for fire extinguishers and see what else they would like to search out.  This interest in fire alarms comes at a good time as will be making our way to the Fire House on the 21st of October.  We also had another fire drill, that went off right as naptime began (of course : ), but the children were able to get together and get out of the building.  They kept their eyes moving though as they noticed the fire alarm is white when it flashes and as we were waiting on the bench outside they were looking for and found the other fire alams flashing through the windows of the school.  The trip to the fire house should prove to be interesting and exciting. 

Today was applesauce day!  My family and I went apple picking a few weekends ago so it seemed like a good time to bring in some apples and do some cooking.  The children used an apple peeler/slicer/corer to prepare the apples.  And after tasting some of the peel (yummy!) brought the apple on over to the chopping table to cut them into bits to help the apples cook.  Then we used the 3 secret ingredients (water, sugar, heat) and boiled those apples down until they turned into applesauce.  As the apples were cooking and started to smell good, Grant commented, ‘It smells like applesauce, but I don’t think it is going to turn into applesauce.’  A few minutes later when Grant, Joshua, and Jeffon were using the potato masher to smush the apples, they all noticed, ‘It IS changing into applesauce!’  Check out the pictures here!

To see pics from the rest of the week click here!

Next week we will be continuing work with Tally marks, making choices, the fire house talk, and begin also talking about the presidential election.  Our children this year seem very interested in talking about who is going to be president and how and why we vote for one.  Have a great weekend and don’t forget NO SCHOOL ON MONDAY!!!