by Liisa Hale | Apr 30, 2018 | Art, Pedagogy, Resources
The teacher sets out different colors of paint in several low dishes, then puts out a dish of rolling tools: a plastic pizza cutter, a small wheel off a plastic car, a small plastic paint roller, a large marble. Today the children can experiment with moving paint onto...
by Liisa Hale | Apr 30, 2018 | Educators, Pedagogy, Resources
With a shriek of joy, five bundled-up children take off at a full run around the climber and back to the fence. It is a chilly day and most of the children are playing inside, so there is plenty of room to run without disrupting other children. The teacher watches the...
by Liisa Hale | Jan 10, 2018 | Pedagogy, Resources, Snapshot
Preschool teachers value “open-ended toys” like blocks and art materials because the children can use them to support whatever play they have in mind. This snapshot shows, however, that they can also often re-purpose specific equipment if the teacher will give them...
by Claire Bainer and Liisa Hale | Nov 23, 2017 | Banner, Behavior, Educators, Pedagogy, Snapshot
It is 11:00 and the Schoolroom children have been playing both in the classroom and in the yard since 9:00. A gentle winding down is beginning the slow transition to story time, lunch and nap. Watching, I can feel the children’s play becoming less vigorous; the...
by Liisa Hale | Nov 22, 2017 | Behavior, Educators, Holidays, Parents, Pedagogy, Resources
Parents and teachers are eager to share cultural traditions with children – sometimes so eager that children end up with lots of disassociated ideas floating in their heads which they try hard to assimilate into their construct of the world. I fondly remember a...
by Claire Bainer and Liisa Hale | Jul 19, 2017 | Pedagogy, Resources
A good teacher is a good problem-solver. An Early Care and Education classroom bubbles with human growth and emotion … and sometimes it bubbles over! To orchestrate a smoothly running classroom, the teacher anticipates rough spots with preventive strategies and can...