SAND AND WATER TABLES

This is a blog for early childhood teachers looking for ways to expand and enrich play and learning in and around their sand and water tables with easy-to-make, low-cost apparatus. It may also be of interest for anyone who appreciates children's messy play.

Saturday, September 24, 2016

PVC pipes and flex tubing

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Two weeks ago I wrote about an apparatus I called the rocking chair waterfall. I called it a rocking chair waterfall because it was made ...

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Saturday, September 17, 2016

Where do my ideas come from?

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This is not a post about how I come up with ideas for building apparatus. Rather, this is a post about the process of writing this blog and...

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Saturday, September 10, 2016

How do children express their ideas?

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Here is a question I want to explore: How do children express their ideas? The question comes from the belief that in the field of early ch...

Saturday, September 3, 2016

Rocking chair waterfall

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Last week I wrote about an apparatus I made from the arm pieces of a bentwood rocking chair. The apparatus was suppose to ...

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Saturday, August 27, 2016

Rocking chair car ramp

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For a couple of years, pieces of a bentwood rocking chair had been sitting in my basement waiting to be repaired. Here is a picture of a be...

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Saturday, August 20, 2016

Worm slide and social connections

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Every year since I bought a "bucket of worms" on sale at a sporting goods store, I have set up a worm slide. Each year it looked ...

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Monday, August 15, 2016

The act of building

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I have never documented the entire building process for an apparatus. Part of the reason may be that the building process for me is an orga...

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About Me

Tom Bedard: Early childhood education has been my life for over 40 years. I have taught all age groups from infants to 5-year-olds. I was a director for five years in the 1980s, but I returned to the classroom 22 years ago. My passion is watching the ways children explore and discover their world. In the classroom, everything starts with the reciprocal relationships between adults and children and between the children themselves. With that in mind, I plan and set up activities. But that is just the beginning. What actually happens is a flow that includes my efforts to invite, respond and support children's interface with those activities and with others in the room. Oh yeh, and along the way, the children change the activities to suit their own inventiveness and creativity. Now the processes become reciprocal with the children doing the inviting, responding and supporting. Young children are the best learners and teachers. I am truly fortunate to be a part of their journey.

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