Mrs. Hood’s Class: Welcome Back!

Posted on by Andrea Hood

Happy New Year! We hope you had a wonderful holiday break and you got some relaxation and meaningful time with your families! We are thankful for all of you and for the joy your wonderful children bring to our lives! What an honor is to see them growing and blooming right before our eyes! We want to thank you also for your generosity through your gifts and encouraging words! Mrs. Wilson and I love partnering with you through this adventure!

Your children transitioned peacefully after the break and they arrived ready to explore the environment and all the new works on the shelves. One of the favorite activities has been exercising to climb up and down stairs in our new climber. Children have been working hard on taking turns, being mindful of others, patience, and safety while using the climber. As soon as they are ready we will add the slide for some more fun!

Some of the most popular works this week were the polar bear family and the penguin sensory box. It’s so great to watch the children starting to use their imagination and create scenarios with these objects while practicing vocabulary.

The favorite books this week were Cub’s Big World By Sarah Thomson and Itsy Bitsy Snowman by Jeffrey Burton. One of the most clear words our students are able to say is “again” so, at their request, we have read them over and over and over.

At the end of the photo gallery, please enjoy a couple of pictures taken during our holiday celebration in December. Thank you so much for each of your donations to make this beautiful holiday breakfast a yummy success and thank you very much for your support during my health emergency!

Our best wishes for a joyful, healthy, and peaceful 2019!

Mrs. Hood’s Class: Jingle All the Way!

Posted on by Andrea Hood

 

Winter holidays are used in our environment as a fun way to keep children engaged, encourage joy of learning, and help us to introduce the passage of time and seasons. Since they bring a sense of light and joyfulness to the long, dark winter months and create a sense of community, we welcome them wholeheartedly. The sound of jingle bells are everywhere in our environment. Your children love exploring the sounds of different size bells while spooning, tweezing, sorting, playing, singing, and dancing.

Some of the favorite works this week seemed to be dressing the snowman while practicing parts of the body vocabulary; the Menorah posting activity where children practiced colors, counting, and new words such as: star, Menorah, and candle; placing ornaments on our tiny Christmas tree and all the new seasonal practical life activities.

Cranberries were the seasonal food we introduced this week! Mrs. Wilson shared with us a fabulous cranberry sauce she made and let me tell you that all your children loved it!  Another 100% liked fruit for your list.

We can’t wait for our holiday celebration next week! Remember you are welcome to send your child in pajamas. Stay tuned for fun pictures!

Mrs. Hood’s Class: To the Beat!

Posted on by Andrea Hood

Rhythm is helpful in all sorts of ways. The pattern recognition inherent in rhythm can help children be better athletes, better observers and better learners. Like any motor skill, rhythm needs to be cultivated and developed. It just so happens the exercises that help develop rhythm can also help with language fluency and reading, two other key life skills for young children to develop.

In our environment, music is a daily activity. Whole body movement songs, finger-plays and instrument times are always part of our morning routine. This week, in our music enrichment class we had fun practicing rhythm with Ms. Kim using different types of drums. Your children’s favorite song was Hey ya Nam.  Children asked for it to be repeated over and over again!

For food tasting, your child tried a fun seasonal fruit: Papaya! As always, children were very attentive to this activity and enjoyed observing, touching, smelling and tasting! This fruit was approved 100% by the whole class! So, go ahead and add a papaya to the list for your next grocery trip!

“Down by the Bay” by Raffi and “All Fall Down” by Helen Oxenbury were the two popular books this week!. “The Bumble Bee” song ranked number one in our popular song list.

This week we also welcomed a new student and her family! She has already phased in and the rest of the class has been very welcoming to her.

Thanks to all of you for your donations for our Vegan banana bread. Children had fun helping in the baking process, sharing with the rest of the school and enjoying the delicious bread for our little Thanksgiving celebration.

We hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Mrs.Hood’s class: Yummy in my Tummy!

Posted on by Andrea Hood

As children grow beyond the infant stage, they begin the journey to independence as toddlers. Many parents notice this change in their children when it comes to mealtime, as they begin to hear a resounding “no!” when it comes to eating the foods they once loved and trying new ones. In order to help families we have integrated food tasting into our toddler program as a way to ease children into the idea of trying new foods by teaching them all about the food and encouraging them to participate as a group.

Since children have been showing readiness and more ability to sit down as a group, we introduced this week a delicious and nutritious winter food: Butternut Squash!

Children were really excited to see the food tasting tray covered. They knew there was a surprise and they immediately gathered quietly around the tray. They were attentive at the moment we removed the towel that was covering the Butternut Squash. There was so much wonder in their faces at that moment! The children enjoyed the Sensorial experience of having the opportunity to explore by feeling, smelling and later on tasting this food item. The squash was presented as a whole first, then cut in front of them, presented as half, and then served individually. In our conversation we included such adjectives as cold, big, mushy, soft, smooth, warm, and tasty to keep adding to our vocabulary.

We taught your children that this particular food is required to be cooked. Children observed while I slowly picked a piece of roasted squash with my spoon and placed it inside my mouth, tasting it slowly and dramatically, this with the purpose of encouraging curiosity and expectation when it was their turn to taste.

Children asked to repeat squash until all of it was gone! 7 of 8 children LOVED it!

From now on, this will be a weekly activity in our environment! Thank you all for all your food donations so we can make this fun activity possible.
If there is a specific food you would really like to introduce to your child, please let us know. We will gladly partner with you to make it a success.

Mrs. Hood’s class: With My Eyes and My Hands!

Posted on by Andrea Hood

Hand-eye coordination is one of the most important parts of the learning process. It helps your child track the movements of their hands with their eyes, which is essential for reading and decoding. Because your child also uses their visual system with hand-eye coordination, it can greatly impact their writing skills and handwriting as they use their eyes to guide, direct, and control their hand movements across the page as they write letters and words.

This week we introduced a couple of fun exercises that focus on this skill. One of them was Water Pouring. This is a Practical Life exercise that also aims for concentration, practicing aiming for a target, and fine motor skills. If there are spills, your children learn to clean up after themselves. Once they are able to control their movements and pour accurately, they can pour their own water during snack time and throughout the day. Another step towards independence! Later on they will be able to to pour a drink for others as it is part of our Grace and Courtesy curriculum.

Another exercise your children enjoyed this week was hammering wooden golf tees into a pumpkin using a wooden mallet. A point of interest for them was to see the golf tee getting inside the pumpkin and be able to hit the golf tee with the mallet using all the strength they had.

Your children also helped in the process of preparing homemade playdough for the classroom and had a great time learning to shape balls and snakes out of it as a group activity!

This week children learned the song open-shut and we introduced the concept of big-small to go with some of our concrete materials on the Sensorial shelf.

To end this note, we want to thank each of the parents that donated books for our classroom! We appreciate it so much, especially each of our students!

Enjoy the pictures!

Mrs. Hood’s class: I can do it myself!

Posted on by Andrea Hood

“If teaching is to be effective with young children, it must assist them to advance on the way to independence. It must initiate them into those kinds of activities which they can perform themselves and which keep them from being a burden to others because of their inabilities. We must help them to learn how to walk without assistance, to run, to go up and down stairs, to pick up fallen objects, to dress and undress, to wash themselves, to express their needs in a way that is clearly understood, and to attempt to satisfy their desires through their own efforts. All this is part of an education for independence”.
Dr. Maria Montessori

Toddlers are naturally eager to learn these things. “Do it myself” might well be the refrain for the toddler years!

Often times, our day-to-day lives make for less than ideal circumstances to help our children achieve the independence they crave. Our homes are not optimized around a little person with his height of less than 3 feet: Objects are hard to reach, too heavy, or too big for little hands to use. Our days are not set up to move at his speed: We rarely just happen to have 10 spare minutes to wait while our almost 2-year-old puts on his jacket!

Yet, enabling a toddler to become more independent has huge benefits, both near-term and long-term. Power struggles decrease when a child feels more in control. Temper tantrums are less frequent when a toddler is busy doing things for himself rather than resisting his parent’s efforts to do things for him! A child who feels capable because he can act in the world, without needing to rely on Mom or Dad for every little thing, is a child who is developing self-confidence.

This week we focused on modeling how to put on a jacket and the daily routine of changing into indoor shoes at the beginning of the morning have been introduced! Children seem to love to practice these procedures and the joy on their faces after accomplishing these tasks is just great to see!

On another note, Knick Knack Paddywhack illustrated by Emily Bolam has been the most popular book this week. Children love to repeat books and this one is a daily request, multiple times during the morning, by your children!

We are also pleased to hear some of our students able to sing the whole song in Spanish, La Lechuza, which we introduced a couple of weeks ago. If you are interested in learning the lyrics of this song to sing it with your child, please feel free to let us know! We will be more than glad to share them with you!

Global Culinary Night is Thursday, November 8th from 6:30-8:00pm.

This is a FWM entire family event.

Grab your “passport” and travel along with us as we visit countries near and far, sampling foods at each stop! This community event is for FWM families to gather together and share a unique dish from their cultural, ethnic, or regional background while also sampling dishes from other FWM families’ cultures.

We hope everybody had a great Halloween! Stay sweet!

Mrs. Hood’s Class: On the move!

Posted on by Andrea Hood

” Movement, or physical activity, its thus an essential factor in intellectual growth, which depends upon the impressions received from outside. through Movement we come in contact with external reality, and it is through these contacts that we eventually acquire even abstract ideas. ” -Maria Montessori 

Your children had a blast in the gym this week! They worked on the obstacle course. They are developing their large motor skills by climbing, rolling and jumping onto the mats. They also enjoyed using the hula hoops and kicking and throwing the balls. We also introduced the balance beam to build their balance.

In the classroom we observed your children’s need to push heavy objects. Toddlers love to move things and carry them around. Hand-powered materials will build upper body and arm strength as well as develop cardiovascular health. With this observation we decided to introduce the push wagon into the environment and oh boy, they loved it!

Mrs. Hood’s Class: Pumpkin Patch and Community Helpers

Posted on by Andrea Hood

The crisp in the air, the change of colors in the trees, and the smell of pumpkins tell us fall is finally here, and we got to celebrate in a special way this week. Thanks to all of you and your donations, children enjoyed a lovely wagon ride through the whole school and had a lot of fun finding and carrying their own pumpkins. We were so thankful our Middle School helpers were visiting us so we could do this activity together as a class! Your children have learned to feel comfortable with these students and they seem happy when they visit us and work with us.

Our little ones kept their eyes open trying to spot the pumpkins during the ride. People all around took also a minute to stop their activities and admire the beauty of innocence and grace each of your children reflect!

As soon as the children arrived to the zen garden they got super excited to see the pumpkins and ran to touch them all, carrying them, playing with them and showing the pumpkins to Grace and Charity, our school rabbits! They were so happy to know they could take their own pumpkin home!

It’s an honor to be able to see your children grow in our community! We are looking forward meeting with you next Thursday, October 25th during our Parent/Teacher conferences to talk more about your child’s progress.