Winds of Change...

Change. It's the one thing in education that we can be guaranteed. Most educators would say that change is necessary and inevitable and not all bad. Yet, when it happens to you it stinks. My entire job description has now changed for next year. Don't get me wrong; I'm grateful to have a job next year. That doesn't mean I'm excited for this change. Two years ago I was cut from my previous district due to lack of students in my area. I had to give up my classroom, my students, my team, my families, all of it. I may be staying in the district, but I am giving all of those things up again. For the same reason. Not due to anything within my control. This is frustrating. I have also had a hand in some changes that will happen in our program next year. And I won't be here to see it or utilize them. This stinks too. I am going from a classroom to a cubicle next year. I am going from working with 3-5 year olds in the classroom, to working with families in their homes. This is a lot to deal with emotionally.

I'm grateful that I have a job; I'm struggling with the change.

Technology

One thing that I have been trying to incorporate more into my home visits is technology. There are wonderful tools available to me, and I think that they could be very useful to use with some families. For example, typically I only see mom or dad at a home visit, as the other parent is at work. For these families it might be helpful to bring in the flip camera and videotape a particular exercise or conversation to be shared with the parent who couldn't be there. I feel that especially for the kiddos that have gross motor concerns where we are introducing and suggesting different exercises and activities to try that I feel this would be most useful. The other day I was talking with a mom after her ECFE class and we were discussing some concerns she had with her child's speech. Her child is very shy and will does not say much when I come to visit her. Another teacher that was with us suggested giving mom the flip camera to bring home to videotape her child during a talkative time of the day for her. It was an awesome idea! I hadn't thought about using the flip camera in that way before. I spoke with the mom a couple days later, and she had some videotape ready to share with me the next time I came out. As I continue to work with families and collaborate with other team members, I hope to find more ways to incorporate technology to ensure that I am serving families with all the appropriate resources that I have available to me.

December Recap

How quickly time flies - so here are the highlights! In December our books were Owl Babies and The Gingerbread Man. I developed a Smart Board activity for Owl babies that included size sorting, and opportunities to use the vocabulary for small, medium, and large as well as comparisons for smaller, bigger, biggest, smallest. My students enjoyed matching the owls to the corresponding size nest. For Gingerbread Man, I found some games that included counting, matching cookie halves, and an interactive story decorating the gingerbread man and turning the pages to listen to the story. To round out all of these technology based enrichments, we baked real cookies and ate them for snack. December was a very successful month of finding existing technology and developing my own activities to enhance our curriculum.