... sing a song! Hopefully many of you have heard us singing with the children at MVS. There are some pretty stellar singers among our teaching staff, including Shannon E-F who often accompanies herself with the ukulele on warm summer mornings out back. The children show us they love songs through their enthusiasm to participate and their requests to sing favorite songs over and over again, but what are they learning when we sing?
For our youngest infants, songs are a source of comfort, soothing, and bonding as a joint attention activity between children and caregivers. They also introduce rhythm, patterns, and varied vocabulary, and songs combined with hand or body motions model coordination and early modes of representation. Older infants start to join in by clapping and imitating song motions; they also find ways to request songs verbally or through gestures. Then as their verbal skills develop they chime in on lyrics here and there, finally learning to sing entire lines or songs solo. Older children further develop their working memory and coordination skills as songs become more intricate and complex. They explore the concepts of rhyme and pattern, and singing also becomes a mode of musical creative expression. And for all of us, songs are one of many things that tie us together as a community and help us show our love for each other. We all know that when someone is singing, everyone is welcome to join in and sing along.
Also, some good news to share from the nation's capital! As part of the February 9 bipartisan budget agreement, the Child Care and Development Block Grant will be increased by $5.8 billion over two years, or $2.9 billion per year. This is the biggest increase in federal funding for child care in history. CCDBG is the main source of federal funds for Vermont's Child Care Financial Assistance Program, and though we don't yet know exactly how much additional funding we will get, we're hoping that the federal increase will encourage our state legislators to match state funds so that CCFAP can come closer to meeting the current need.
Thanks for reading!
Megan
News and Reminders
We will be closed on Monday, February 19th in observance of President's Day. Enjoy the long weekend.
Classroom Updates
Infant I
The first half of our week was very quiet as several children stayed home to recover from illness. We missed them very much, especially on Valentine's Day! (And did lots of cleaning in the meantime.) But Thursday and Friday were much more lively. Our older children loved walking on the soft snow and splashing in the puddles, and the younger children also enjoyed the warmer temperatures with a waterproof layer between them and the snow/slush. Inside we've seen lots of tower construction and interest in books with photos of other infants. A couple of the younger children have also taken to rolling, scooting, and playing with thin scarves on their heads, just like their older friends. A will be moving to Infant II next week; we will definitely miss her fun-loving spirit but think she will love being next door!
Infant II
Our children have been constantly on the move this week both inside and out. The children explored with flour this week in the sensory table and liked throwing it up in the air. A few new interests this week were putting their own food in the compost bucket, watching people sand the driveway and having dogs visit us. Not everyone wanted to get too close but most got excited to see the dogs and a few children even pet them. We've seen a lot of exciting development in both language and movement during the past few weeks. N is moving to the Toddler class on Tuesday and we will miss him! We look forward to having A join us and helping her transition into a new routine.
Toddlers
We had a nice, lively week in the classroom; so much energy and spirit! This week we are working on clear expectations with our peers and clear, direct words with classmates during difficult social interactions. We are also working on using appropriate, kind and respectful language in the classroom. We really enjoyed celebrating Valentine's Day on Wednesday and got very excited to wear our MVS traditional felt hearts on our hats and outside clothes. This week we enjoyed singing as we got dressed to go outside. On Tuesday O will move up to PS1; we will miss you!
Preschool I
We have a need for speed! After observing some exuberant play with toy cars flying through the air and across tables last week, Shannon E-F demonstrated how to build ramps with blocks. The children immediately got to work experimenting! They've tried sliding cars, other blocks, rocks and plastic animals down the blocks. Shannon E-F also modeled adjusting the angle of the ramp and wondering, "What happens now?" Some of the students noticed the cars roll even faster!
Preschool II
This week in PS2: space, satellites, germs, assessments, and inverted one-hand push-ups. Our investigation into space took us to the far reaches of our universe to the icy dwarf planet(?) Pluto and the New Horizons mission to photograph the planet by attaching telescopic camera to a satalite and sending it a decade ride away from home. We also discussed other satellites and how they orbit and send pictures and messages back to earth. On Monday we shoveled out our own rocket launch site, while helping to save our sledding hill, and sent our rockets to collect snow samples to return to mission control M at our launch site. Some of our rockets broke down in space and mission control needed to send rescue rockets to repair them.  Germs are not for Sharing was more than just another library book we read this week; it was a change in our understanding of the importance of good hand washing and the why's, when's, and how's. We discussed how it is important for us to keep our germ shields clean and not to break them by putting them near our eyes, nose or mouth. And as we ramped up our hand washing we also took some time to help with the laundry and cleaning up our classroom and earned many thanks and a full kindness jar--where will our next field trip take us? When we were not pretending to rocket to space, working to clean our class room, shoveling snow to rebuild sledding hills, or performing a difficult one-handed push-up (one of the more challenging exercises we attempted this week) we worked on letters, numbers, shapes, patterns, rhymes, counting, spelling, writing, and so much more. Great work PS2 on your winter assessments!
We have been working in PreK on representing information in a variety of ways. This is an important piece of both STEM learning and emergent literacy. For Valentine's Day children practiced writing to convey meaning to each other. We created some graphs to represent numbers shown on a die, then made some Valentine's graphs showing the number of pink hearts versus red hearts. We plan to continue graphing in different ways next week. Some children have also been working on representing their plans and creations with drawings, and several children worked with Tori to create construction straw representations of a rocket ship. We have enjoyed pushing the boundaries of our children's imaginations and abstract thinking skills in this way.
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| What started as a graphing activity *may* have turned into an art project. |
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| These "worker guys" are planning to use tools and block "bricks" to create the ideas they've drawn on paper. One plans to build "The Empire State Building;" the other, a "work for grown-ups." |
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| Sand in the sensory table reminds us of summer days at the beach. |
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