It's difficult to think anything but pleasant thoughts while eating a homegrown tomato. –Lewis Grizzard

Homegrown tomato days seem pretty far off right now, but the food program is still going strong at MVS! This week I polled a few teachers for some new group snack suggestions since our old ones are sorely out of date, and I'll also add these to the Group Snack Suggestions page. Here are a few good options:

• Muffins
• Hard boiled eggs
• Pretzels and peanut butter
• Cheese sticks
• Yogurt and granola (maple yogurt, plain yogurt, strawberry yogurt, banana yogurt, vanilla yogurt, greek yogurt...)
• Cheese and crackers
• Hummus or dip with crackers/pretzels/veggie sticks
• Homemade smoothie or smoothie ingredients (we have a blender at school)
• Clementines
• Applesauce
• Baked goods
• Quiche
• Fruit of all kinds; they love trying different things like kiwi, berries, or mango
• Cottage cheese and fruit
• Rice cakes
• Chex mix
• Peanut butter and apples
• Bananas with peanut butter or yogurt
• Waffles, English muffins, or bagels with jam, peanut butter or cream cheese (usually the PreK class can toast these but their toaster oven is not working at the moment)

Thank you, families, for your continued support of group snack! And thank you for being mindful of any dietary restrictions or allergies in your child's class–check with their teacher if you're not sure.

If anyone's particularly interested in young children and food at the moment, two books we can recommend are First Bite and French Children Don't Throw Food. First Bite by Bee Wilson is all about the neuroscience and psychology behind how we develop taste and food habits. French Children Don't Throw Food by Pamela Druckerman is an outsider's perspective of French parenting styles. Both books have been influential in shaping the food culture we have been working to develop at MVS through the food program.

Thanks for reading,

Megan

News and Reminders
We are having a weekend play date at the sledding hill behind the Stowe Elementary School on Saturday (today!) from 10 am until noon. The weather should be beautiful, please join us!

Our first parent potluck of the year is this Wednesday, January 24 at school–a great opportunity to connect with other MVS families.

We also wanted to suggest that parents send your children to school dressed in the wool base layers you'd like them to wear outside. Teachers don't always have time to help children change their clothes as they manage a large group getting dressed for outside time. As someone who occasionally wears wool all day I can assure you that it's comfortable, even inside!

Classroom Updates
Infant I
Our week has been filled with lots of songs, books, and stuffed animals. Many of our younger children love to have stuffed animals placed around them, and they often pull them right onto their bellies or faces to get up close. The cow seems to be everyone's favorite, closely followed by the snail puppet. Book-wise we have been reading cloth books together frequently as well as the I Spy book and, of course, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? Finally, we've been thrilled to hear our older children singing those songs they've been hearing for months and months. They sing during diaper changes, transition times, dressing routines, and while at play. Music to our ears!

Infant II
We have been spending extra time outside this week. The children have been having a great time pulling each other in sleds and carefully walking and balancing on and over a board we made into a ramp. Spending extra time outside in the mornings has made our children very tired and they are taking longer naps. Flashlights have been a major interest this week. The children have been working hard at figuring out how to turn them on and off. They love shining them all over, especially when the lights are off. This week we also worked together to wash a bath book that we've been reading in our sensory table. We are working to help them understand that we wash things to get them clean.

Toddlers
This week we worked consistently on kindness: being kind to others, talking in a kind manner to peers and adults and having kind and gentle hands with classmates. We suggest giving peers hand shakes and high fives when wanting to interact. Puzzles have been a big interest this week with our younger children showing particular focus and interest in matching colors and shapes during the puzzle sorting process. We have continued our great interest in the new dishes, pots and pans in the dramatic play area. The children role-play making different foods, specifically soup on Thursday. We continue to work hard with the children on independence and self-help skills, with special focus on pulling on snow pants and putting on snow boots by ourselves. Have a great weekend!

Preschool I
Unfortunately Team Shannon was divided this week due to vacations and illness, but the children enjoyed getting to know Stefany, a teacher new to MVS. Looking forward to a return to normalcy next week!

Preschool II
Hockey was the hit of the week with everyone getting very involved and encouraging other classes to join in the fun. If block and puck wasn't their jam, cleaning the sandbox rink with blocks like a Zamboni or cheering on our two teams (The Sharks and The Spiders) was. Everyone found a way to join the fun. Library Story Hour was back to our great delight and included books about helpful Ninjas, building Nests, and heroic Nurses. What books might "O" week bring? At circle this week we really enjoyed The Cookie Fiasco book where four friends found a way to share three cookies by breaking them in half and then in half again, so each friend could share three equal pieces. We re-created the story at the lunch table, having some fun with the math. We also re-created The Mitten story and compared two versions of the story that had very different endings. Finally, thank you Shannon E.-F. for the new straws and connectors–we have enjoyed building on our own during center play and working as a group to connect our individual projects into one large team structure. This week we attempted to create a Christmas tree with a string of lights. Next week?

PreK
First off–your children never cease to amaze me! The connections they are making and their developing skills and the looks on their faces as they discover new concepts and abilities–it all makes each day new and wonderful. This week we created some new letter recognition activities (sorting, naming and even moving letters with chopsticks!). The chopsticks came to us along with all the delicious ingredients for "Bee-Bim-Bop" which we had for snack on Tuesday. BeeBimBob was a book read to us at the library. We checked it out an brought it back to school to read several times. We are so grateful to Amy F. for helping us bring literacy to life and providing an unusual and very delicious food experience. Other highlights of the week include our new hospital area (thank you Andrea G. for bringing a real x-ray); listening to a new batch of stories on CD for our headphone station (thank you Rachael K.). We also switched our schedule back to having snack before circle. This not only gives us a little more time between snack and lunch and more time to get to activities like story time, but it also makes it easier to split our group to transition to the outdoor activities. This week while the first group geared up for outdoor play, the second began a music appreciation program. We'll be exploring several instruments, but this week–rhythm sticks!

Dr. S. makes notes on the patient's chart while her staff checks the x-ray

The first step... following directions!

This is the way we tap our sticks, tap our sticks...

Fine motor skills and letter recognition in one

Taking care of a patient in the ICU

Sorting by color

Below are some photos from the early stages of our ski program. It's been super fun. Way to go skiers and thank you to the parent volunteers who have been joining us!