Toddlers are curious about the world around them and eager to learn new things. One educational topic that captures their imagination is the life cycle of living things! Teaching toddlers about life cycles has numerous benefits, including building scientific knowledge, fostering curiosity and wonder, enhancing vocabulary and language skills, encouraging hands-on learning, and instilling empathy and respect for nature.

Spring is the perfect season to introduce these concepts (even though winter had a sneaky appearance, huh?)! So, this week, we started our studies on the life cycle of a chicken! From interesting eggs to fluffy chicks to clucking hens, the journey of a chicken from egg to adult is a fascinating process that toddlers always seem to enjoy!

So far, we have focused on two concepts: chickens come from eggs, and a baby chicken is called a chick. Children enjoyed some short educational videos where they could observe the hatching process. The smiles on the children’s faces were so priceless.

To bring a real-life experience to this topic, we explored an egg as part of our food-tasting lesson. We introduced vocabulary words like shell, egg white, and yolk. Children seemed surprised to find “a yellow ball” -as one of the children called it-  inside the egg. Children were able to take their time and strengthen their fine motor skills by learning how to peel their eggs.  They seemed to enjoy cracking the egg and carefully peeling the shell. I encourage you to allow your toddler to practice this skill at home. It’s truly a great exercise! Peeling an egg requires coordination between the fingers and thumb. This can improve dexterity and precision in hand movements, plus it helps their patience and persistence tremendously! 😀 The children seemed to feel proud of themselves.

Some of the children didn’t find the sliminess of the boiled egg very attractive and didn’t want to taste the egg, but other children kept asking to repeat the activity and taste another egg. It’s always fun to observe how the children react to these sensory experiences and how their brain seems to work hard on classifying the textures and flavors of the food items we introduce. To reinforce the Spanish language, the children were also introduced to a fun Spanish song called Los Pollitos. In Spanish, the chicks say, “pio, pio,” instead of “chirp, chirp.” Just an interesting cultural bonus sent your way :). I hope you enjoy the song at the bottom of this note and practice with your children at home if you would like.

Based on our color studies, we introduced the concept of color mixing to the children this week. We gathered the children to circle and showed them what happens when you mix yellow with blue color. It was a magical moment! The children’s expressions were amazing! They couldn’t believe that we had made a new color. Their faces seemed to be in awe! Immediately, they were ready to take a turn at the easel and make the magic happen by themselves!

Lastly, we celebrated another 3-year-old birthday in our class! It’s always such a special day for all!

We hope you all have a wonderful weekend. If you are planning to visit a farm as a fun spring activity, please take the time to observe the chickens and talk with your toddler about what you see.

Best,

Mrs. Hood and Ms. Mollie 

Color recognition can provide children with essential learning tools in life. For example, color recognition is used in mathematics to categorize, sort, compare, and organize. Additionally, as children learn to identify colors and use color as a language tool to describe things, it develops and strengthens their ability to communicate effectively. Recognizing and identifying the color names is important to a child’s development. It is considered a marker and milestone in a child’s cognitive process.

Colors are part of our daily lessons throughout the school year when using the different materials, games, books, songs, and activities in our environment. However, during the next weeks, we will purposely focus on studying the colors of the rainbow.

As an introductory activity,  we started this week  by observing a walking rainbow experiment.  Using cups with water, paper towels and red, blue and yellow food coloring, the children got to observe how the water traveled through the paper towel and mixed in the empty cups creating new colors like orange, green and purple.

How does this experiment work? The water moves up the paper towels through a process called capillary action. The paper towel is made from fibers, and the water is able to travel through the gaps in the fibers. The gaps in the paper towel act like capillary tubes and pull the water upward. This is what helps water climb from a plant’s roots to the leaves at the top of the plant or tree. The water is able to move upward against gravity because of the attractive forces between the water and the fibers in the paper towel.

Children observed in awe the different stages of this experiment throughout the week. The main expression used was: Wow! Followed by giggles and little dances.

On another note, children worked happily in our class gift for our FWM Annual Gala & Auction. A big shout out to our amazing class moms, Shannon Turkett and Regine Hooper-Campbell, for coordinating and to Roberth VanEgghen, Megan Lang, and Neetha Desai for volunteering their time to come and work with the toddlers on this project! We SO appreciate you! They also had some fun with Miss Sara Hunsucker, our school art teacher, preparing another great project for the auction!

Lastly, a new popular piece of equipment was introduced in the movement area: A sensory spinning chair. Spinning on a chair provides intense vestibular input, which helps toddlers develop their sense of balance and spatial orientation. This stimulation can be calming for some children and can improve their ability to focus and attend to tasks.  Spinning on a chair requires coordination and motor planning, which can help toddlers develop their gross motor skills. It can also improve their core strength and stability, which is important for posture and overall physical development. The repetitive motion of spinning can have a calming effect on toddlers, helping them regulate their emotions and reduce feelings of anxiety or frustration. To say children LOVE this chair is an understatement!

We hope you all have the most wonderful Spring break! See you in two weeks!

Adios!

Mrs. Hood and Ms. Mollie