Healthy Eating

Reminder: We are closed this Monday in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. 

Another reminder about safe foods for children under 2. We ask that you do not send the following foods for children under 2: pretzels, popcorn, raw carrots, nuts, or whole grapes. These foods are all choking hazards and we try to be as careful as possible. Thanks! 

As many of you know, we have group snack in our three older classrooms. Families bring snack once per month for the whole class. It has worked out really well for everyone. The children are very excited to when it's their turn to bring in snack and are proud to show off what they made. It has also created a wonderful sense of community in the classroom when the children are all sharing the same snack. We have conversations about new foods and it makes it very easy for others to try new foods. 

We wanted to share some great snack ideas: 

• This week one classroom ate kiwi cut in half. We even tried the skin! Some children preferred to pick it up and eat the skin while others used spoons to scoop it out. It required some fine motor strength to figure out how to scoop out the fruit too. 
• One family made a "fruit snake". It was sliced bananas and strawberries connected by strawberry cream cheese that snaked around the plate. 
• For a child's birthday celebration a family made pancakes in the shape of the first letter of each child's name in the class. 
• Hard boiled eggs and edamame go together really well it turns out! 
• Homemade granola bars with oats and raisins. 
• Mini muffins are always popular too. The best recipes are the ones made with applesauce and no sugar. 
• Oatmeal with maple syrup
• Yogurt with fresh fruit or granola
• Trail mix
• Applesauce and graham crackers
• Different types of sliced veggies (we can cut these at school). 
• Quiche is delicious and well liked. You can throw in some great veggies in it too. 
• Pita bread with hummus or dip. One parent made a great black bean dip that the children really enjoyed.

As always please make sure to check with your child's teacher about any allergies or special diets in the classroom. 

Classroom Updates

Infant I: The babies enjoyed the warmer temperatures this week and discovered the challenge of crawling and walking on ice. It took a lot of trial and error to find the right ways to move about. A few of the older children explored playdough for the first time. It is a new sensory medium and there was a lot of time spent poking, touching, pulling, and squeezing. The toy bar has been of great interest for the younger children as they try to reach for the hanging items and sometimes just watch as they sway back and forth. 

Infant II: The warmer temperatures meant much more outside time this week. There were puddles, ice, mud, and ice chunks. The ice was frustrating, intriguing, fascinating, and perplexing. By the second day, the children had learned ways of manoeuvring themselves. Self-help skills of getting undressed are really progressing. Putting on hats, pulling up zippers, putting on socks, shoes, and boots, as well as learning how to flip on their coats are just a few of the new skills emerging. Inside there was a lot of dancing with scarves, singing, and of course "Chicka, Chicka, Boom Boom". 

Toddlers: The toddler room is hard at work on our routines and performing our classroom jobs throughout the day. The children have had such pride in themselves when working on routines and tasks. This week we have noticed a significant increase in the children's interest in books and reading. We have spent a good deal of our day reading books, making sense of the words and print, and concentrating on the language we are hearing. We are really starting to understand that the print and text in books has meaning. We are starting to interact with books in meaningful ways, predicting words in the stories and interacting during read alouds. This is really exciting for us as teachers too! 

Preschool I: The pizza cooking has not gotten old yet! More recipes, concoctions, and creations in the kitchen are happening every day. There has been a lot of feeding the dolls as well as one another. Some children have also brought in the puppets. With figuring out where to put our hands inside to make them move and creating voices and actions for the puppets, it has been quite fun and exciting for us. Due to the ice, we talked about safe ways to walk outside. We worked on walking like penguins: small, slow, low steps. We have found a new interest in penguins due to this safe walking practice. We are learning about where they live and what they like to do. Outside we noticed the wind and how it pushed the pine tree branches around. We also observed how the clouds were moving through the sky. We spent a lot of time watching and talking about the wind and how it feels on our bodies. 

Preschool II: This week our phonetic awareness has gone up a notch. Our daily discussions and practice on listening to sounds and making them with our mouths has become an all day activity. We practice while we are getting dressed, outside playing, eating lunch, playing in block area... it is all the time! We are working hard on identifying the muscles needed to make different sounds. We are also listening for sounds that are similar and finding ways to differentiate between them. There are conversations between children about letters, sounds, and words. The interest in strong from all of the children. Outside we stayed at school all week. The weather provided us with a challenging and ever changing environment to explore. There were a couple of days that were too icy to slide down the hill so we found other ways of utilizing sleds and filling our need for sliding. The children also discovered that by taking the hay from the hay bales and spreading it out on the ice it would create traction for easier walking. They worked hard with the other preschool classes to spread out the hay. 

PreK: This week we have been working on letter recognition up through the letter E. We also have been focusing on fine motor skills, especially those involved with holding and manipulating scissors, pencils, paintbrushes, silverware, the list goes on. We put a couple of hollow blocks and boxes with holes in the bottom into our sand area to use with funnels. Children use them to invent all kinds of interesting machinery. We are also working hard on our table manners and skills during meal times. Speaking kindly to each other to ask for and to respond to requests for food and drink, our tone of voice, waiting to talk until our mouths are empty, and of course covering our cough, and turning away from the table for sneezes, just a few of those important life skills! 

A few photos from our week:

Watching as an older sibling shows the toddler class how to make a ball out of playdough. 

I am cooking pasta.