The Project Approach and Other Resources

I thought I’d share some things I’ve found recently. During the past couple of weeks, I’ve been learning more about The Project Approach which is based on projects instead of themes. I learned about it from a classmate. Basically, you take something that your class is interested in and turn it into a long-term project. I thought this approach was interesting because it expands on things that are meaningful for the kids and it shows that kids really can have longer attention spans if they are allowed time to focus on a project or using different materials. Some examples of projects that I thought were interesting are Baby Project and this project about lunch. there are many more examples of projects on this page if you are interested in looking at them. There is also an adapted version of the project approach that you can use with toddlers called Project Practice. Obviously the projects for toddlers won't be as advanced and they mostly focus on experimenting with project materials and the basic skills of working on projects. I’m not sure that completely switching over to the project approach would’ve went well at places where I’ve worked, but I think including some of the concepts would have been helpful especially for the kids that became very interested in some of the themes.

Another interesting resource I’ve found is Early Childhood News which has links to lots of articles and other things. This will be useful for me with my classes.

Finally, while looking at another blog and I can’t remember who’s it was now, I came across the Eric Carle Blog. I didn’t know he had one. It doesn’t look like he posts often, but I thought it was interesting that he has a blog. Another related link is to a recent news article I read about The Very Hungry Caterpillar. It’s being used to fight early childhood obesity. There are a lot of food related activities you can do connected to this book so I think it’s a good choice. It’s really important for kids to learn about healthy foods. Click here to read the article.

That’s all I have for now, but later this week, I’ll be posting another sensory tub and how my volunteering goes with the babies tomorrow. I know I haven’t been posting as often as I used to either because I’ve been busy or haven’t had any inspiration to write. I’ll try to post more activities in the upcoming months. I’ve recently gotten a few more followers and I wanted to thank you for reading my blog.