Process or Product?

School is in full swing; everyone is happy, routines are in place, kids are making new friends, but what’s going on in there?

A lot! So much that one blog post can not cover it, but one item that bears discussing are the papers that your child may be bringing home. Scribbles, paintings, treasures, “nothing.” While we aim to produce nice, refrigerator quality artwork and crafts worthy of display, many of our daily activities are more focused on the PROCESS of doing, rather than a bright, shiny, adult determined finished PRODUCT. Even with the best intentions to send home a finished product, craft projects can go awry and not turn out as expected. While this can sometimes upset us as teachers, our fearless leader is always there to reminds us that the goal is the process.

To explain: using any art tool, any medium, any modem is in fact allowing a preschooler the freedom to create, explore and experiment, but did you realize all of those artistic endeavors are also pre-writing exercises? Massachusetts Frameworks expect that preschool students need to:

• Strengthen hand grasp and flexibility (using hole punches, staplers, squeezing glue, using clay)
• Use thumb/forefinger in pincer grasp (placing small objects on paper, using stickers, drawing with small pieces of crayon or chalk)
• Use a variety of tools and materials to build grasp and release skill (using scissors, cutting different materials)
• Build finger dexterity (stringing beads)
• Use eye-hand coordination, visual perception and tracking, and visual motor skills in play activities (trace around stencils and templates, simple weaving, color mazes or follow a left-right movement at easel, dry erase board, paints)

So, rest assured, a lot of learning is going on even in the smallest, most insignificant scrap of paper that may come home!