At Monday's Board of Education Meeting, Director Heidi Schmidt shared an update on the progress towards Strategic Plan goals at FECC along with fun and exciting things on the horizon, such as the Young Athletes Special Olympics program in partnership with Life Lab of Ferndale. One point she focused on was the importance of novelty in an early childhood classroom to capture attention, create interest and activate essential learning behavior. FECC has created an ever growing Materials Lending Library to support teachers in being able to routinely provide new and engaging experiences within their classrooms. Staff are able to request any of the items to borrow for use in their classrooms as a way to enhance, extend, and challenge student thinking.
Mrs. Schmidt was joined by Ms. Shelby Martin, Lead Teacher in a tuition-based classroom, who shared how she accesses the lending library often to increase student engagement and learning. Prior to inviting members of the Board to play with her and a few of her students' new classroom toy, she shared what STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) looks like in a preschool classroom. All in a day's play, students at FECC are involved in data analysis, experimenting, predicting, drawing conclusions, counting, measurement and problem solving. One of the most novel items in Ms. Shelby's class is Air Toobz (https://shorturl.at/pNVWZ).
Members of the Board got a front row seat to observe and participate in the STEM learning that items like this provide in the early childhood classroom. In these ten minutes alone, the students were seen experimenting, problem-solving, working together, making predictions, using spatial reasoning, making comparisons and most importantly, having fun while learning through play.
