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.

Wednesday, April 21, 2021

Balance

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Scott McCredie in his book Balance: In Search of the Lost Sense calls balance the sixth sense.  For the most part, we take it for granted n...
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Monday, April 5, 2021

Gifts and gratitude

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I have over 25,000 images of children in the classroom from my work as an early childhood educator.  Even though I am retired, I am still ab...
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Monday, March 22, 2021

The life of a dead tree trunk in the classroom

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In a way, this post is a sequel to my previous post about the possibilities for play in a provocation I called the Swamp. The environment ...
Tuesday, March 9, 2021

All play is local

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All my adult life I have watched children play.  Even when I was not in a classroom, I paid attention to children's play whenever I was ...
1 comment:
Saturday, January 9, 2021

Postscript to picture of the year

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I am revisiting the play episode with my grandson from my previous post entitled "picture of the year."  The reason I have done th...
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Saturday, January 2, 2021

Picture of the year

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Every year I designate a photo my picture of the year.  It has been a strange year to say the least.  A strange year deserves an offbeat pic...
1 comment:
Sunday, December 13, 2020

An apparatus from 30 years ago

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Looking through an old filebox of pictures that I took before I had a digital camera, I found a couple pictures of an apparatus I built over...
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About Me

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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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