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.

Our Toddler environment is set up in a specific way, looking to sharpen and challenge these skills while meeting your child exactly where they are developmentally. Each material is displayed in progressive order, from easiest to hardest, and from left to right. This logical structure encourages children to organize their thinking and to absorb the outcome of the material at their own pace. The left to right orientation of the materials also assists children with preparation for reading and writing, and is the way that the brain naturally processes information.

Some of the most popular works in our environment these days, sharpening these skills, are hammering wooden golf tees into a pumpkin, nesting forest animals, the ring box, opposites language cards, leaf sorting, hand transferring pumpkins, spooning pumpkins, threading wooden fruits and many more. 

In the practical life area we added two great fundamental lessons, one of them is water transferring. To make it even more interesting we used a sea wool sponge for transferring. As basic as it sounds, it’s one of the popular works these days.  The “magic” of watching the water disappear and get inside the sponge is fun but it’s even more fun when suddenly you squeeze the sponge and all the vanished water comes out. Children received two new vocabulary words when observing the bowls used for the transferring. They like to repeat them over and over: empty and full. At the end of the activity they were encouraged to look for spills and wipe up all the spills with a towel.

The other lesson was putting on a jacket. Children received a lesson using what we called the “fliparoo” trick. Children have been practicing this skill over and over. Please see the below video on the lesson and please support your child at home to practice this skill. 

In language we introduced woodland animals. This week we focused on introducing the names of a moose, owl, beaver, black bear, fox, squirrel and deer, and children continue to work on the names and colors of land, air and water vehicles. 

For food tasting we explored cranberries and, oh boy! How well received was this fruit! Make sure they get some during your Thanksgiving dinner. They all kept asking for more and more! 🙂 

Lastly, we had fun celebrating a birthday number two and enjoyed some treats together!

Have a great weekend, 

Mrs. Hood and Ms. Bethann

And like that, October is gone and we continue having fun here at the Toddler level!

Last week we celebrated the fall harvest with our annual wagon ride and visit to our very own “Fraser Farm” located in our Zen garden which was transformed into a beautiful pumpkin patch for our toddlers to explore.

First the children were invited to ride in wagons all around the school, knowing that they needed to keep their eyes open for the pumpkins. Once we arrived at our Fraser Farm, children were ecstatic to run around and pick their own pumpkin. There were giggles and so much excitement! Children explored different sizes of pumpkins and worked hard to carry them around. We all had a great time! When the time came, every toddler got into their wagon, carrying their chosen pumpkin, and we went for another ride around the school arriving, at our classroom ready to celebrate by sharing some yummy doughnuts and apple cider.

A big shout out to our wonderful Middle School students who happily offered to pull the wagons for us. Also a big THANK YOU to our wonderful class parents and to all of you who helped with wagons, donations and volunteering. We are thankful to be part of a community that cares!

As a highlight this week, we introduced our students to one of the most beloved activities in our Montessori environments, flower arrangement. Dr. Maria Montessori introduced Practical Life exercises to provide children with opportunities to perform simple tasks that they have already observed at home. Practical Life exercises enable children to care for themselves, take care of the environment, and develop respect for others. Care of environment activities encourage the child to interact with the environment, exhibiting respect and love. These activities help the child form a connection with their environment and find a personal responsibility towards it.

This is a beautiful activity that offers so much to your child’s development. Through this exercise, children develop a sense of beauty, the mental task of sequencing, they learn to exercise the judgment of size and capacity in matching flowers to vases and in pouring water, also, manual dexterity as they need to fetch water and use different tools. This activity also indirectly prepares your child for botany studies in our Primary program and offers a great opportunity to work on independence and concentration. Your children LOVE it! We can’t thank you enough for your weekly flower donations!

On another note, we explored Dragon fruit for food tasting. What a gorgeous and interesting fruit! Even though it is quite flavorless, most of the children really enjoyed it and kept asking for more. So feel free to add it to your grocery list and enjoy its benefits, as it strengthens the immune system.

To end our week we enjoyed the visit of Mrs.T, a 34 year old turtle who is the pet of one of our students. Children observed and some were brave enough to caress and hold her. We love it when animals visit our environment!

Enjoy the pics and have a great weekend!

Mrs. Hood and Ms. Bethann

“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! Our day-to-day lives often 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 their height of less than three 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 their speed: We rarely just happen to have ten spare minutes to wait while our almost two year old puts on their jacket!

Yet, enabling a toddler to become more independent has huge benefits, both short-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 themself rather than resisting their parent’s efforts to do things for them! A child who feels capable because they can act in the world, without needing to rely on a caregiver for every little thing, is a child who is developing self-confidence.

In our environment your children work daily on practical life exercises that aim for independence, as this is the main part of a Montessori Toddler curriculum. One of the self-care exercises your children have been working on over and over this week has been nose blowing. Between fall allergies, growing an immune system, viruses everywhere, and the infamous New England unpredictable weather, it seems children need tissues constantly. That’s why there is a nose blowing station in our environment. This is a small area with a small mirror at children’s eye level, a small table that holds a box of tissues and a small trash can. The first part of the lesson refers to the “pinch and pull method.” Basically, we teach them to look at their face in the mirror to see the mucus, how to place the tissue in their hand, pinch their nostrils and pull away from the face. As children master this part, properly blowing their noses will come second as they will be more aware of their body. We then finish the lesson by throwing the tissue in the trash and washing and drying our hands.

We strongly encourage you to support the learning of this skill by providing a nose blowing station at your home as well. It’s easy to set up and let me tell you, it is so rewarding when you realize your child is actually able to help keep their own face clean without you having to chase them all around the house or clean up mucus from different surfaces.

In another note, children enjoyed the visit from the Botsford Fire Rescue. All children that wanted to climb the truck and explore it inside were welcomed to do so. They also received a presentation from a very kind firefighter on how the firefighters’ gear works. It was so great and we are so thankful for this wonderful visit!

Lastly, we celebrated a birthday and explored a delicious spaghetti squash for food tasting!

The favorite books this week were Germs Are Not for Sharing by Elizabeth Verdick, All by Myself by Aliki, and The Itsy Bitsy Pumpkin by Sonaly Fry.

We are looking forward to meeting you at our Parent-Teacher Conference next Thursday, October 27th to discuss your child’s progress and goals in our program.

Stay warm and healthy,

Mrs. Hood and Miss Bethann.