After a Story Interactions

Our last post showed our children and teachers saying goodbye to one another in song.  Today, we give you a little more detail about every-day, long-distance learning with our LEAF preschool children.  Let’s begin with saying good morning:

 

Later that same morning, Teacher Janet read the group a story about a wayward dinosaur named Tyrone who was mean to his friends.  In the next clip you’ll see Teacher Janet asking Juan, a preschooler who is at home in his make-shift learning lab, what happened in the story.  A short summary of the conversation translated to English is below (it is not a direct translation).

T: What happened in the story, Juan?

S: In the story, he was taking all the things and they were fighting…

T: Excellent. You were really paying attention…what did you draw?

S: I was going to draw on this (holds up the paper) but I don’t know how to draw a dinosaur.

T: (relates how to put shapes together to draw a dinosaur)…first it’s a circle, an oval for the face…it’s like a puzzle how to put the shapes together for the whole dinosaur…you have dinosaurs at home, you could look at while you draw…

 

Here is a video of another similar interaction.

T: Luis, we have muted all the other children so we can chat together, just we two. What are you drawing?

S: The bad dinosaur

T: How did the dinosaur act? How? Why?

S: He didn’t share anything.

T: At the end of the story what happened? He was looking for something

S: The money, the treasure

T: You can draw that on your other paper…and what do you have on the map so you can find the treasure?

(Mom is holding the map up off camera to the left and there is a short interaction finding the X).

 

Our teachers meet with the children and their parents 4 days a week for about 45 minutes in the morning via the internet.  We have professionally contracted adult educators who meet with the parents in early afternoon for their English classes and Parenting workshops.

We know that the best way to teach children this age is in person and our goal will be to return to a 4.5 hour preschool day with our Early Childhood Education (ECE) certificated teachers. Until we can safely return, we continue a well-planned, developmentally appropriate preschool program as exemplified in the video clips above.

NOTE: We hope, for those of you who speak Spanish fluently, you will have patience with our teacher’s Spanish in the same way we have patience with our English learners’ English!