I recently spent time with the pre-k class during lunch when we were eating vegetable soup, grilled cheese, veggies, and tea. There were many requests to "Please pass the green beans" and "I would like more soup after you're done." I also heard children saying, "There are two sandwiches left, how about I have one and you have the other?" Of course, there were moments of sadness when someone took the prized tomato but with a little support and discussion we were able to handle it, find a solution, and move on. There were also moments of encouragement for children to try new things. The support from the other children was impressive.
At a recent parent meeting, we discussed the importance of teaching social skills. For children to be able to navigate a busy table full of people, food, and some ridiculous joke telling, is quite a skill. These skills will follow them to kindergarten, when you take your family out to dinner to a busy restaurant, or at a large holiday meal with family and friends.
At school, the way we support and encourage these social skills is by first establishing expectations and boundaries for meals. The children know that once they sit down at the table to eat, they are expected to stay until they are finished. They also know that we speak kindly and respectfully to one another, without interrupting. They also know the rules of passing food to one another to get it around the table. When the children are finished they know to compost their left overs, rinse their dishes, and put everything into the dishwasher. After lunch, they also know that the next steps are to use the bathroom, wash their hands, brush their teeth and get to their cot. We have established these routines to allow children to be in control of themselves and to feel competent and independent. We constantly involve the children in the decision making for the rules and expectations. We have discussions about why it's important to wait for someone to finish talking before we say something. We encourage the children to share their feelings and ideas to support one another in meeting and following these expectations.
We hope that you see some of the incredible social skills the children have developed at your own dinner table.
Thanks for reading,
Sarah
News and Reminders
The Parent Collaboration Committee is hosting and Open Gym for all MVS children (even the littlest ones) at the Stowe Elementary School on March 24th from 9:30 am - 11:30 am. Please join us for some time to run, jump, dance, and socialize.
A child in the prek class brought in a delicious snack for a birthday this week (there are pictures in the prek classroom update). They were fruit popsicles made from frozen fruit and coconut milk, that's it! The children loved them.
Classroom Updates
Infant I
More of our younger children tried sleeping outside this week, shielded from snow but breathing fresh air, and we are recognizing more and more benefits of this practice. In our experience we find that the children wake up happier and more refreshed after sleeping outside, and the fresh air also helps reduce coughing and congestion. Inside we have been working on communicating our needs, especially during meal times. We ask the children to sign "more" or "all done" so they can tell us what we need and we know exactly how to help them. Reinforcing these signs at home would be great, too–ask us if you'd like to learn them! Finally, balls continued to be a big focus this week as L re-joined us after several weeks away; she led the older boys in some major explorations of physics using balls and the ramp. It was a great reminder of how every child contributes to social learning and leads the group in unique directions.
Infant II
This week our focus was on snow! We played with it in the sensory table with colors each day and the children loved scooping, mashing, and eating it. Outside just about everyone worked more on moving around in the deep snow, which we were very excited about given that it came up over their knees! Inside we have been focused on listening skills and following directions, verbally recognizing when children have done so and following through on our words as teachers. Our art activities included painting with red paint on Monday and then using more play dough at the end of the week, which the children loved. They used cylindrical rolling pins to turn balls of play dough into pancakes and also pounded the pancakes with the ends of the pins. Finally, we want to make sure all of our parents know that we will be taking a break from writing weekly journals in order to focus on putting documentation into Teaching Strategies GOLD. We will be writing a group note every day by the cubbies.
Toddlers
This week we let our exploration of snow run wild. From navigating through deep snow to creating paths and building snowmen, our children truly enjoyed the weather. They were particularly fascinated with icicles and loved gathering them during our outside time. In the classroom we continued our snow play by adding it to our sensory table. Imaginations came to life as we scooped, built, and created with the snow. Kindness was also a priority in our classroom this week. With reminders and encouragement, the children do a wonderful job respecting friends and peers.
Preschool I
Winter is back, and with it, the single digit temperatures! The children are eager to continue playing in the snow, so please send in lots of extra base layers, socks, neck warmers, and other gear for bundling up!
This week we revisited some ideas about freezing and melting ice and tied it in with art. The children helped mix paint and water and poured it into buckets and ice cube trays to create colored ice cubes. Waiting for the ice to freeze was one of the trickiest parts of the whole process. After putting the paint/water mixture in the freezer, we counted to 10 and then checked on an ice cube tray. Huh, still water—so we tried counting all the way to 20! But it hadn’t frozen even after counting that high, so we agreed to play outside while we waited for the ice cubes to freeze. We then tried using the ice paint both outside and inside. Painting outside is fun, but the colored snow looked tasty to some of our peers, so next time we paint the snow we will have to think of a different place to try it out than the playground. For indoor artwork, a parent had generously donated an old bed sheet for a giant canvas. The children made “ice prints” and hand prints by melting the paint onto their hands and then pressing their hands on the sheet. Given the popularity of the giant box, perhaps we can ask the children if they want to use the bed sheet as some kind of cozy shelter once it is done being decorated.
We’ve also begun reading a book, What Does It Mean to be Kind. We talked about how a lot of our strong words, such as “please,” “thank you,” and “I’m sorry,” are also called “kind words” in this book. One child asked an important question: “What is bullying?” Alfie the mouse puppet came out at snack time to help break down what bullying might look like. One child said, “Ew, yucky mouse!” Alfie replied, “I don’t like that you called me yucky, that made me sad. Please stop.” Fantastically, the child immediately replied, “I’m sorry!” We talked about how if we had kept calling Alfie yucky, even after he’d asked us to stop, that would be bullying. These are big ideas that take time to break down and explore, so we’ll probably be spending at least another week on this book. Stay tuned!
Preschool II
Problems? What problems? We are problem solvers. There's no problem too big, there's no problem too complicated–when we work together we can solve it. We started out our week by using a map of our cot resting spots to set out our cots in a different arrangement. It was exciting to hear the team work together helping each other to read the map and place their cots. PS2 is also solving the congestion dilemma at our cubby area by using our cot areas to dress and undress while we take turns putting our things away neatly at our cubbies. Next, "Who is the line leader?" and "Why?" have been questions repeatedly asked lately, so this week the class made their own plan of having a line leader(s) each day. This will be a work in progress and the leader will have some added responsibilities, but they were all very excited to help pick the day and the partner they will work with to choose who leads us out in the morning and who leads us back inside. It was impressive to listen to them negotiate which days they all wanted with no arguments! Rock, Paper, Scissors still remains a fun way to hash out who lines up after the line leader and is also played just for fun while we wait for friends to finish getting dressed–there are always rocks inside there mittens, figuratively, and also literally in our pockets and baskets... Spring, what spring? I thought we were just playing in the mud last week. This week it was SNOW SNOW SNOW. We made snowballs for targets, we made snowballs big enough to climb on, we made snow castles, snow towers, and snow forts. We also took our sledding to the woods on a great adventure to Woof trail with PreK and found some exciting sledding/hiking terrain.
PreK
With Jen out on Monday, Tori out on Friday and a snow day in the middle it's been a strange week in PreK indeed. But we made the most of it! Dealing with change is good practice as we begin to prep our outbound Kindergarten children for their adventures. (If your child is headed to SES you should have gotten an informational flyer in your cubbie this week.) In other news, we started investigating the notion of "making things move" and made a list of our ideas. This will begin a larger project next week utilizing our new STEM kit from ECHO. Other fun included bringing in some snow and ice to experiment with what they would become when they melted. Most guessed it would melt into water, but a few thought maybe compost!
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