SMART room

At our school they have a room called the SMART room. It's actually pretty neat. Each class gets a time to go and they work on a lot of eye-hand coordination, large motor and small motor skills. They do balance beams, monkey bars, a trampoline that they jump on and at the top of each jump they have a number or word to read. They do crawling on mats where they have to put their hands on pieces of paper as they crawl and say one of the words, numbers or shapes on the paper. The do tracing lines with one eye closed, they do pencil rolls, alligator crawls, and lots of other things. The girls absolutely love it. It's really a good program. Anyways, as of yesterday they started doing an open gym at the school for all the ECFE aged children (preschool down to newborn). ECFE is our preschool program. During our open gym time we are allowed a time slot in the SMART room. The PE teacher took all of us in there and showed us each station and what we were supposed to do at each. Then she left us on our own. It was pretty funny to watch. All these kids wanted to do was play with the balls and jump on the trampolines - remember, Dillon is one of the oldest - so you have these moms in there trying to get the kids to do what they are supposed to do at the staions and you have the kids running around doing whatever they want. Well, we had moms doing the alligator crawl, the pencil roll, crawling on the mats saying the words on the papers as they placed their hands on them and learning to dribble with one hand. I'm not sure who in the room was SMARTer - the kids for taking advantage of fun new things or the moms because we all did the stations properly and learned to trace things on the wall using our "not favorite" eye!