I've realized that titleing these entires with the post-date makes less sense when I'm re-cappiing a period of past time.  SO...until I catch up to the present, I think it makes the most sense to title my entires by the time period they document.  So, here we have the first half of January, upon returning from Winter Vacation.

Dramatic play and the block building to support the scenarios found a productive balance during these weeks.  Children appeared equally invested in the process of building and the play, movement, and conversation that developed around and within it. AT other points in the year, one element or the other often took on the focus, but in observations from this time the distribution of energy and effort seems especially even. 

 
The Group's keen interest in all-things-pirate seemed to reach a summit.  here we observe carefully gathered and tended "treasure."  There is something about being 3- or 4-years-old that makes you inclined to moments of collecting, hoarding, piling and sometimes dumping.  To contain these collections, the children are likely to build sturdy structures, often with sophistication, attentive care and beauty. 

"Buried treasure" is another frequent variation.  IIIs often build to "hide" or enclose other materials - accessories and the like.  There appears to be something satisfying in the enclosure process - like some element of control is being excercised over the materials, reassuring the child's capabilites and intentions. 

                                                            December:

While plenty of rich, imaginative dramatic play continued, looking back over the photo records of this time, I notice that there was also an intense exploration of "lining up" going on.  Many of the children's buildings including some variation of lining up, stacking and generally neatly placing blocks with great intention.  Some of these buildings supported pretend play scenarios, while many others were simply "building for the sake of building."  What follows are several examples of this style of building work, all of which happened in December.

 
(two different views of the same structure: from beside and from above.)

In November we saw dramatic play take center stage.  The children began to use the unit blocks primarily as props and also to build settings (hospitals, baby beds, pirate ships and magic forests, to name a few!) to support their dramatic play.

it went something like this:

"baby hospital" (The babies, it was explained, were in the "waiting room," the enclosure next door was the actual office.)

"library" (the squares are books being neatly lined up on shelves)

 "truck" (I was struck by this building not only for it's clever use of pilars to stablize the sideways cylinders, but also the symmetry and design.)

"laptop computer" (This was a building theme that several children in the Group returned to frequently for several weeks.  Indeed they would build their computers and then quietly sit, touching the "buttons," dutifully trying on the role of grown-up computer user.)

After an extended period of technical issues (and frustration!), it seems that I'll finally be able to continue blogging and hopefully nothing more will go missing.  Let's keep our fingers crossed.

So, the imperfect solution to this gap in documentation is for me to take us back to the end of October and re-trace the development since then.  While this will feel much more overview-ish than I would hope, I think it makes the most sense and should hopefully catch readers up to date so that we can spend the spring watching the IIIs' work with a full school year of context.

Late October:

As the children became increasingly secure and confident with the blocks, they began spending longer stretches of focused time on individual builidngs.  Many, many trips between the block shelves and the building site were made as the IIIs discovered, with excitement, the large and interesting structures they could create with an abundance of blocks.

At this point familiar building themes (baby beds, for example) began to take on increased effort and detail.  Greater numbers of blocks began to be used as well as a wider variety of blocks within a single structure.  Earlier the IIIs had been inclined to build entirely with one or two block shapes, say brickies and roundies, but by the end of October an increase in block shape choices could be observed. 

It's becoming clear that blogging on a regular basis is not necessarily compatible with being a good teacher and at the same time maintaining some semblance of a personal life.  There are so many exciting moments and new discoveries each week that I feel to do the experience real justice I would need to post on a near daily basis.  I promise to do my best.  For now, I will share some lovely images captured over the past week.  we've observed the IIIs quickly developing comfort and familiarity with the unit blocks.  We're seeing more confident and "out there" experimentation, as well as a new step in the social studies element - building rudimentary representations of familiar places.  You'll notice clothes pins in one photo; we've recently introduced the clothes pins as a new material and, while it's challenging for some of the children to squeeze them open, they've been popular both as a building accessory and also used to secure cloth on their baby dolls.  The images below, as described by the children:  (in order left to right, top to bottom) "The longies keep the roundies from slipping away." "I made my house - it's a tall building with a roof.  Not a play roof like at school, though."  "They're cookies baking!" and "Quick! get the keys.  The pirates are inside."  Please enjoy and I'll try to include more thorough commentary soon!