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. Thomas’ Class: Practical Life

Posted on by Stephanie Thomas

Materials in the Practical Life section of any Montessori environment are there to support children’s practice in everyday life skills. In our Toddler environment, the children enjoy a variety of activities which include: transferring glass gems with a small spoon from one bowl to another, cutting strips of paper with loop scissors, spooning snack, pouring water into a funnel to fill a vase for flowers,  and scooping balls with an ice cream scoop into a muffin tin. All of these activities require an implement for them to manipulate with different grasps and wrist movements, strengthening their hands and fingers for the handwriting that will take place as they get older.

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!

Some of our Favorite Things!

Posted on by Stephanie Thomas

The children are enjoying a variety of activities and works these days. Included in the photos are several posting activities in which the children use their hand-eye coordination to manipulate various materials and place them through a hole or onto a post.

Other favorite times in our class include “circle time” and music class. Both of these events incorporate movement, rhythm, and simple, repetitive lyrics.

Mrs. Thomas – A Gross (Motor) Halloween! :-)

Posted on by Stephanie Thomas

The back field offers the children a wonderful place to run, jump, and tumble safely. What could be more fun than all of that? Why, adding pumpkins of course!

Thanks to your generous contributions, the children not only enjoyed the gourds and pumpkins in our environment, they also “picked” sugar pumpkins from our “patch” in the field.

The children were delighted to arrive to the field and see the pumpkins in the distance. And we enjoyed watching them exert big energy and use their large muscle groups to run, bend, lift, and carry their weighty pumpkins to a wagon. They were all tired after this event, but it was the kind of tired that comes from doing fun work.

A big thanks to all of you for donating to make this event happen. It appeared very simple, which is appropriate for this age, but it took a lot of planning and execution on the part of our class parents, Lisa Jackson and Elle Nicholson. THANK YOU, Lisa and Elle!

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.

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. Thomas – Thank You!

Posted on by Stephanie Thomas

It was wonderful to meet with you this week for conferences. We had a lovely time talking about some of our favorite subjects: your children!

Enjoy these photos from September and October.

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!