Music and Sand

Today I spent a few hours with the toddlers, but since there were a couple extra teachers, I spent most of the time in the classroom cleaning and taking care of other things while the kids were either napping or outside. Towards the end of the day when there were only two kids left, one of the girls decided she wanted to play the drum. It’s a medium sized drum with two sticks. We both took one. Her drumming was loud of course so I showed her that she could drum quietly as well which didn’t last long. She kept trying to put the sticks back into holders on the drum, but she couldn’t quite push them in. I’d get them started for her, but then she realized it worked better if she pushed them in with her foot. We also tested what the sticks sounded like when moved across the drum and on three different balls. After a while she pushed them away and went back to loud drumming with both sticks. One of the supervisors came in and told her that she loved her music. They had one of those stability balls in the room so she loved bouncing on that too. She thought it was fun to fall off. This girl usually gets into trouble almost every day, but today she was doing great. She didn’t get in trouble at all and on the playground, she skipped around telling everyone how happy she was.

I stopped by the infant room to see if the teacher in there needed help. Crawling Baby came over to the gate and started to whine at me so I picked him up and talked to him for a few minutes. When I went to put him down, he started to cry so I tried to get him to play with a couple toys, but then the teacher suggested I take him to the sand box. He was happy out there. He liked watching me shovel sand into a bucket. I’d do it in different ways. Sometimes, I’d slowly let the sand fall into the bucket or quickly dump it in which he thought was funny. I started to dump the bucket because I thought he’d enjoy seeing the big pile of sand, but he didn’t want me to. He wanted me to keep shoveling and patting. I started to tell him about the texture of the sand when he spotted his mom on the preschool playground. I held his hands and we walked over to her. She told me how much Crawling Baby loves the sand box, but I think he was glad to be going home.

Team Work and Musical Chairs

A few months ago, I took an online class about games for toddlers and preschoolers.
One thing that they’ve suggested that I haven’t had a chance to try is a different
version of musical chairs. They pointed out that toddlers and preschoolers do better
with games that are based on cooperation instead of competition. I thought this version
of musical chairs could be a good activity to do within the first few weeks of having
a new class to practice team work.


What you do is run the game like musical chairs using a chair or a mat for each kid.
When the music stops, you take one chair or mat away and let all the kids continue
to play.
By the end, you should have one left and all the kids have to find a way to be touching the chair somehow.

That way, no one feels bad about losing or geting bored
because they have to sit out while waiting for the game to end. When I was a kid, I hated musical chairs for both of those reasons. Now that I’m a teacher, I have to hear someone bragging to the rest of the class about how they are the winner and the rest of them are losers for ten minutes. It happens no matter how many times we tell them it’s just a game, no one in the class is a loser, we can always play again another time etc. This version solves most if not all of those problems. If anyone tries this, let me know how it goes.