Imaginative Play with the Owls

by Sarah Post

This time of year in the Owls classroom is for play, projects and rhythm. We love to play in the Owls room: it is a part of every aspect of our day. Owls look forward to imaginative dramatic play outside in the snowscape and inside the classroom when building fabric forts and cities out of blocks. We play with sounds and with numbers–counting backwards is fun when you are counting down to zoom to the moon. Using our sounds in motion, we blend sounds together and practice rhyming. Play is important for so many reasons, but the biggest reason for Owls is that it’s engaging and fun!

Our favorite project this time of year is our 100 Day Project which we start brainstorming about and working on in late January. Owls think up, design and then create their own project that focuses on 100 of something. Owls experience many ways of counting to 100 while working on their projects as there were many times when they counted and recounted their work to see how many more they needed to make. This year we had a 100 piece puzzle, 100 bubble art bookmarks and 100 watercolor window decorations! It was quite the collection and we loved sharing our work with the community during our 100 Day Project celebration in mid February. We also studied Fiber Arts and had rotating groups of mixed ages to explore and learn about different fiber arts. We had knitting, embroidery, and making God’s eyes. Another group activity was “March Activities” where we explored special properties of water, continued with fiber arts and learned some life skills in the kitchen while baking granola bars to share for snack. Math is all about counting to 100 and beyond! We spend a lot of time counting collections of objects in the classroom. We think about counting backwards and how it relates to the idea of subtraction. Owls just finished learning all the motions for each sound of the alphabet. Learning the motion from the program Sounds in Motion is valuable to Owls as it’s another mode of input for letter sounds. Each motion relates to the letter sound’s pitch, duration and how the mouth, teeth and tongue work to make the sound. Owls use the motions when listening for sounds to write and blend sounds to read. We are currently working on consonant digraphs which also have their own motions to represent the unique sounds they make. A favorite is the story about Happy Goose and Angry Goose to go with the voiced and unvoiced “TH” sound.

Owls find comfort this time of year in the rhythms we created earlier in the year. They look forward to outside time every day where they practice the skills of risk taking, problem solving, empathy, imagination and self-advocacy, just to name a few. While some of our day needs to have flexibility, Owls find comfort in the rhythm of Snack, Lunch, Read aloud, Explore Time, and our Morning and Closing meetings. These activities keep us anchored throughout the day, so we can go with the flow and be flexible when needed.