Mrs. Wilson: Valentine’s Day Celebration

Posted on by Cynthia Wilson

Last week, the children had a Valentine’s celebration. We started the week by decorating bags with heart-shaped foam stickers. On Valentine’s Day, the children, along with Miss Jade and Mr. Kenyon, made apple donuts by spreading strawberry-flavored yogurt and sprinkling Valentine-themed sprinkles onto a heart-shaped apple slice. Afterward, the children put their gifts into their friends’ Valentine’s Day bags one by one. We ended the celebration by giving out heart balloons that Ms. Sara and I gifted the children and had a fun dance party. Ms. Sara and I want to express our gratitude for the lovely gifts we received on Valentine’s Day.

This week, we will continue to celebrate our family and friends, as well as ourselves. We tasted ruby red grapefruit during our Food Tasting activity this week. All the children seemed to enjoy its sweet, bitter, and juicy flavor. A couple of children noticed how good the room smelled from the scent of the grapefruit.

Love and Light

Cynthia and Sara

Mrs. Sargeant: A Peek at the Week

Posted on by Christine Sargeant

Last week wound up being a shorter week than we expected due to the snow. The toddlers enjoyed a delightful Valentine’s Day celebration filled with joy and camaraderie. They enthusiastically joined forces to create a “friendship fruit salad,” pooling their efforts to open containers, meticulously wash, and expertly prepare the array of fruits. Along with their fruit salad, they enjoyed raspberry muffins and sipped cranberry juice. They exchanged valentines and were thrilled to take home their specially decorated bags filled with goodies -spreading smiles all around.

We explored the themes of kindness and friendship, emphasizing the importance of helping others. Within our classroom, these values are demonstrated vividly as the children willingly assist each other in opening water bottles, offer to carry a friend’s lunch or drink to their designated spot, help one another hang their coats, and retrieve slippers from their cubbies.

Our food-tasting experience extended through this week and included both avocados and guacamole. The avocado was more popular than the guacamole. 

The toddlers have been exploring Arctic animals and engaging in hands-on experiments with ice and water. They’ve been actively observing how water interacts with ice, noting how it causes the ice to melt and drawing connections between the two states of matter.

See you next week! Christine & Lizette

Mrs. Sargeant: A Peek at the Week

Posted on by Christine Sargeant

A large part of our work with toddlers is to lay the foundation for developing emotional intelligence—the ability to recognize, understand, manage, and express emotions. Cultivating emotional intelligence in toddlers is crucial for their social and emotional well-being.

Teaching children to identify and name emotions is the first step in teaching children about their own emotions and the emotions of others. Being able to identify and name their feelings can help children to feel heard and understood. Introducing toddlers to a diverse range of emotions through books, stories, and discussions will develop their emotional vocabulary. Since toddlers often mimic the actions and attitudes of the adults around them, demonstrating healthy ways to express and manage emotions is crucial – such as taking deep breaths to calm down when feeling frustrated. One of our favorite books this month was In My Heart: A Book of Feelings by Jo Witek. We have read it numerous times, and it has inspired discussions about times when we’ve felt a variety of different emotions. The children especially enjoy hearing the anecdotes that I share with them about times when I have felt brave, happy, sad, etc. 

For this week’s food-tasting experience, we tried beets. The children seemed very fond of exploring the whole beet and were quite eager to taste this vibrant root vegetable. Some studies have shown that children need to be exposed to a new food at least a dozen times before they make a final decision about truly liking it or not, so perhaps consider adding beets to your menu this week – maybe topped with crumbled goat cheese!

The children decorated their Valentine’s Day bags this week, and we’ve been reading Valentine’s books that celebrate friendship. We’re looking forward to exchanging cards next week. 

Wishing you all an enjoyable weekend. 

Christine and Lizette

Mrs. Wilson: Nurturing Emotions and Celebrating Family

Posted on by Cynthia Wilson

In the month of February, our learning activities will focus on emotions, family, friendship, and self-love. During our circle time, we have been practicing a lovely song called “I Love My Body” by Mother Moon. At the end of the song, we give ourselves a big hug and recite positive affirmations such as “I am special, “I am kind,” “I love myself,” and “I am amazing.”

One of the topics we are exploring in-depth is emotions. We begin by looking at photos of children making different facial expressions and then guessing how they might be feeling. The children then practice making those facial expressions by looking into a mirror. Our older toddlers have been asking insightful questions, such as why a child might feel happy, sad, or angry, prompting us to discuss what makes us feel happy, sad, and angry. This month, we will continue to work on understanding, expressing, and how to cope with our feelings.

For families, we have a fun matching game in which the children can match their own and their friends’ photos to their respective family photos. This is a wonderful opportunity to practice language skills as they introduce their friends to their family members. We have also added a dollhouse with figures from diverse cultural backgrounds so that children can create their unique family units.

Food Tasting: We tried a fruit called gooseberry. This fruit had a sticky texture on the outside and a sweet and sour taste. If you haven’t tried gooseberries before, we highly recommend them. Perhaps your child can lead a food-tasting activity at home with your family.

Love and Light,

Cynthia and Sara

Mrs. Hood: Emotional Intelligence!

Posted on by Andrea Hood

Human emotion. We are so very lucky to each experience such a wide-ranging set of feelings, but that experience can be quite the roller coaster, especially if you are a toddler.

Supporting and teaching emotional intelligence to our students is one of our main goals in our toddler class. First, we do so by teaching the toddlers to identify and name emotions, their own emotions, and the emotions they see in others. It’s very important to teach children that there is a range of emotions and that ALL emotions are OK. Once children can name their emotions, they can better express themselves and feel heard and understood. We can then help the child develop techniques to manage that emotion.

This week, we focused on this theme during our morning circle time. We utilized songs, emotion cards, and captivating books to reinforce the vocabulary of emotions and their visual expressions. Some of the emotions we explored included happiness, sadness, anger, excitement, and shyness. In the upcoming weeks, we will continue to expand this emotional vocabulary.

Children also have been pretty engaged with all the new materials in the environment and had the opportunity to work on decorating their Valentine’s Day bags in preparation for our celebration next Wednesday, February 14th. Our older students, who grasp the concept better, are particularly excited about this event.

On another note, we explored delicious oranges for our food-tasting lesson, and it was a hit. Furthermore, children were introduced to the process of making orange juice all by themselves! Children worked their muscles and their maximum effort by making sure they squeezed and twisted their orange into the handheld juicer. After this, children practiced their fine motor skills by transferring the juice into a small pitcher and then serving themselves their orange juice into an open cup. To say that they seem to enjoy the process and the result of this activity is an understatement.

Lastly, we celebrated another 3-year-old birthday in our class! It’s awe-inspiring to witness the remarkable growth of our students every single day.

Enjoy the snapshots,

Mrs. Hood and Ms. Mollie

Mrs. Hood: The secret of perfection!

Posted on by Andrea Hood

“To have learned something for the child is only a point of departure. When he has learned the meaning of an exercise, then he begins to enjoy repeating it, and he does repeat it an infinite number of times, with the most evident satisfaction.”- Maria Montessori, The Montessori Method

In a Montessori environment, repetition does not necessarily mean that the child has to engage in the same exact work over and over again. Anything that provides the child with the practice of a previously learned skill, including extensions and games, is repetition.

Dr. Montessori said, “Repetition is the secret of perfection.”

Through repetitive exploration, your children are able to look at a material from different angles and explore it, letting it become part of their understanding of the world. At the same time, it allows them to self-critique: they look at how they are doing something and make slight changes in order to perfect the action, making it more efficient. The Montessori environment is designed to support exactly this kind of learning. Children choose their own work, allowing their interests to guide them to a choice. They are drawn by desire, and that allows them to return to an activity with frequency, working with it until they have perfected it. It is, in fact, a developmental need. A common phrase you can hear in our environment is the children saying: “Again!” Dr. Maria Montessori wrote, “When a child has attained this stage of repeating an exercise, he is on the way to self-development, and the external sign of this condition is his self-discipline.”

Based on our observations, this is just ONE of the many works your child seems VERY attracted to lately and enjoys repeating:

Amelia- Shapes board

Anaya- The seasons puzzle

Avery- Opening and closing containers

Alexander- Arctic animals matching

Connor- The seasons puzzle

Divya- Flower arrangement

Emma- Snowflake stickers

John- Naming and exploring vehicles

Love– Creating shapes with elastics in the Geoboard

Reagan- Cutting

Zion- Exploring “I Spy” books

On another note, the children enjoyed exploring parsnips during our food-tasting lesson this week.

Enjoy your weekend,

Mrs. Hood and Ms. Mollie

Mrs. Wilson: The Importance in Food Tasting

Posted on by Cynthia Wilson

Food tasting is a valuable experiential learning activity for toddlers in Montessori classes. First, it encourages sensory exploration, allowing toddlers to engage their senses and develop their sensory perception and vocabulary. Additionally, the guessing games during the tasting foster cognitive development, encouraging toddlers to think and make connections between their senses and the object being explored. Furthermore, communal food tasting promotes socialization and cooperation, allowing toddlers to develop important social skills such as taking turns. Finally, incorporating food preparation into the curriculum aligns with the Montessori philosophy of promoting independence and practical life skills. Toddlers gain a sense of accomplishment as they participate in the hands-on process of preparing their snacks, fostering a positive attitude towards healthy eating habits. In essence, food tasting in a Montessori toddler class provides a holistic learning experience, nurturing the physical, cognitive, and social development of young learners joyously and purposefully.

This week, we tasted clementines, and each child had a turn to peel, separate the segments, and serve their fruit onto a plate or bowl after we demonstrated and tasted it together.

Mrs. Sargeant: A Peek at the Week

Posted on by Christine Sargeant

The week flew by! We tried broccoli. Raw did not go over very well, but the steamed broccoli was a hit! 

We were thrilled to have a few warmer days to enjoy on the playground. The children are becoming much more independent in dressing themselves for the outdoors. Zipping one’s own coat can be quite tricky. We tend to get the zipper started for the children, then encourage them to zip it the rest of the way up. Many of the children are now able to get their coats on and off independently as well. Has your child shown you the special ‘flip’ that we do at school? They stand by their hood (or toes to tag if they have no hood), put their arms into the arm holes, and flip the coat over their head, beaming with pride upon completion. Taking their coats off can be a bit tricky as well. Rather than jumping in to complete the task for them, we tend to help the children just a little in order to set them up for success. For example, help the child to take one hand out of their coat. Then, that hand is free for them to use to take off the other side. I often tell them that we work as a team to get the job done. We can see on their faces that they feel empowered even in the tasks that we adults may consider small.

A few favorite activities this week have been painting at the easel, re-telling Bear Snores On (by Karma Wilson) using the felt board, and driving the PlasmaCars in the gym. We walked to the gym without our rope, “just like the big kids,” which was very exciting. 

We have a new group of Middle School students who visit us weekly as part of their Social Impact program. The children are delighted when our new friends join us. Bryant, Anders, Emma, and Allie have been enthusiastic role models and also really seem to enjoy their time with the toddlers. 

Wishing you all a healthy weekend filled with a perfect balance of fun and relaxation.

Christine & Lizette