We Are Helpers! Part One: I Can Help My Family

Our first inquiry of the year was all about helpers. We have helpers all around us in our day to day lives. When working and teaching preschool age children we think of helpers in two categories:

First--Who helps me? How do they help me? How can I show my gratitude for people who help me?

Second--How can I help? 

During the first two weeks, we talk about our helpers at home. We have lots of people who help! We used a picto-web to share information about the people who help us at home and how they help. 

Next we learned all about creating thank you cards. We know that saying thank you brings love and sunshine to the hearts of those who go out of their way to help us. 

As this is the beginning of the year, many of us are just becoming familiar with print as a form of expression. That's okay. We can tell our stories many ways. We can tell our stories with pictures, we can tell our stories with oral speaking, and we can tell our stories with written words. A good goal for us was to become familiar with the written names of family members. 

Because we are an international school, we all have different names for our family members. As I say to my students--we are all alike, and we are all different. We all have family members who help us. We are different because we may call our family members different things. 

To create the front of these cards, I wrote the words thank you in dark crayon. The students then used watercolours to paint over the crayon. The black wax shone through the watercolour. 

After we created our gratitude cards we set about with the second part of our inquiry:

How can I help? 

We want our students to be global citizens. We want for them to be involved and to seek to help others. Now many of my students have nannies at home. While they may help their mums and dads with the occasional task--many have never assisted with any kind of helping job in the home. I decided to teach them some basic chores they can help with around the house!

I sought inspiration from the Maria Montessori List of Chores:

During our rotation times I showed the students.... 

....how to wash and rinse dishes (using bubble bath for soap)

...how to dust the shelves

...how to fold towels

...how to sweep up

...how to hang clothing on the line (not a lot of homes in Thailand have actual dryers)

...making a bed (I love how carefully they tuck our stuffed friends in!)

When we were all done, we got to help in the classroom as well--we used tape to tidy up all the broom fibers! Helping happens everywhere and the more we work together the more we are capable of accomplishing!

You'd be surprised at how much fun the students had doing chores!. When we were done, we discussed the feelings of helping. How does it feel when you help someone? It was a great time to take our our Kimochis and briefly discuss the feelings of 'happy' and 'proud'. 

I kept these explorations open during our center time so students could revisit them and continue to practice the house helping skills we had learned!

It's great to start this inquiry off in the home. When we discuss learning topics that children can feel involved with--it is so important to keep topics close to their day to day experiences. As you'll see in the posts to follow, we soon explored helping in the classroom as well as helping within our school!

Until next time learning buddies!

Sam