SHOW AND TELL
Bring a piece of clothing you don’t wear everyday
Topic: Clothing
Clothes protect, cover, and adorn us.
The value we’ll be studying is compassion, which is to understand how others are feeling.
For manners, we’ll learn how important it is to stay cheerful and to help others.
Outside, we’ll play Simon Says.
The songs we’ll be singing are Ten in a Bed, We Shall Overcome, Let There Be Peace on Earth, Circle of Life, High Hopes, and Say, Say, Oh, Playmate.
For creative dramatics, we’ll practice good manners
Our art activities will be hats, sew a shirt, laundry, and cardboard looms.
For motor development we’ll work on flexibility with yoga postures. For proprioceptive skills, we’ll play push apart, statue walk, tug-of-war, and leg push.
LEARNING TO FALL
We hold our breaths as an infant first gets up and begins to totter across the room. She’s walking! With all the joy, exuberance, and trepidation of entering a whole new world, the adults want to guard against every bump on the forehead and every scrape on a knee. And yet . . . . Our children need to learn how to fall as a preparation for life. For new students in the martial arts, among the first lessons is how to fall. It’s important to learn how to fall so that you’re not hurt and then how to get up and go at it again. Our children look to the adults in their lives to learn how to react to falling. If the adult laughs, dusts off the child, and sets him on his way again, the child learns to react to disappointments that way. If on the other hand, the adult reacts with alarm, tells the child she’s really hurt, and looks for someone to blame, then the child also will react that way.
Little ones first learning to walk have their center of gravity about 12 inches from the floor. It’s really not that far. Little children typically will hurt themselves in little ways. A child who falls from a child height typically won’t hurt himself more than a child-size hurt. When they’re climbing and get a little past where they’re comfortable, you can help best by not handing them down, but by talking them down. Mashing fingers in a door that a child shut or a finger in a drawer that the child closed mainly just is a child hurt. The adult’s acknowledgment that the incident was scary or that it really hurt and then encouragement to press on with the adventure at hand is so much healthier.
Children, indeed people, need to fail. We learn very little from success. When we do things easily, we tend to do it that way again and we haven’t stretched ourselves. It is insight about failures that leads to innovation. People who push past failure learn perseverance and creativity.
It’s hard to stand back and allow a child to learn with all the mistakes that requires. It’s hard to do what is truly right for our children. We hate bumps and scrapes and scratches. It’s like we’re not protecting our children. In fact, all those little hurts teach our children how to avoid the big hurts. You want your child to be creatively alive, searching out new territory, exploring the world, and viewing each day as a miracle. Goethe, one of the most creative thinkers of all time says, “Treat people as they are, and they remain that way. Treat them as though they were what they can be, and we help them become what they are capable of becoming.”
In General
Valentine Exchange - The children will be exchanging valentines on Tuesday. Your child should have enough valentines with his name written on the back for every child in the class. This is a quiet little ceremony when we focus on expressing care for each other.
Mardi Gras Parade – On Tuesday February 28, we will have a Mardi Gras Parade. The children will form one line and march from class to class playing various musical interments and the teachers will hand out traditional Mardi Gras beads. If you have some beads collecting dust consider contributing to our parade.
Know How to Construct a Garment? – In the enrichment curriculum next week we’ll be talking about how clothes cover, protect, and adorn us. If you have skills to construct a garment (sewing, knitting, etc.), please offer to share with your child’s class one afternoon. It’s amazing how little we know about “hand made”.
Newsletter – If you would like to get our weekly newsletter via email send a request to MMGS737@aol.com
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