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 peeling, cutting, transferring, and serving a banana, the nesting forest animals, the shapes box, cranberry transferring, gluing work, matching pictures from children around the world, vehicle object to picture matching, and using a dropper to transfer water, along with many more.
On another note, last week we had a great time baking banana bread. Children learned names of ingredients and had the opportunity to touch, smell, watch, and obviously taste the fruit of their work during our Thanksgiving celebration. Gratitude is definitely something we cultivate every day in our environment. We are conscious that showing gratitude is an important part of who we are as humans. It strengthens our relationships and our connection to our communities and even makes us happier and more compassionate people.
Although adults understand the worth in expressing gratitude, young children find it more difficult. Gratitude involves being sensitive and empathetic to others, and truly appreciating what others do for you. While children can quickly learn to say please and thank you, it takes time and guidance to help them truly learn to be grateful. Using The Thankful Book, we have had multiple conversations and it has been great to hear children start expressing thankfulness for things like mommies, daddies, siblings, and of course hair, shoes, ears, ice cream, dinosaurs, and “horsies”.
During this time we also welcomed a new student and her family to finally complete our class, celebrated two wonderful birthdays – one of those mine (THANK YOU VERY MUCH!) – and explored sweet potatoes and pomegranates as a class.
As always we couldn’t do this without your support so we honestly thank you for it and for entrusting your children to us every day!
As we all prepare for the holiday season, we wish you joy, love, and peace.
Enjoy the pictures,
Mrs. Hood and Ms. Maria
