SHOW AND TELL
Bring a thing you found on your nature walk.
Topic: Earth Day
Nature is a living, breathing part of us
The value we’ll be studying is frugality, which is using our resources wisely.
For ecology, we’ll make paper and study watershed runoff.
Outside, we’ll learn how to take a meaningful discovery walk.
The songs we’ll be singing are Mr. Sun, Edelweiss, This Land is Your Land, Catch a Falling Star, and When You Wish Upon a Star.
For creative dramatics, we’ll hear the story of How the Wicked Dragon Grows.
Our art activities will be the dragon grows, compost mural, tree of endangered life, rainforest frogs, and nurture nature badges.
For motor development we’ll work on coordination with multi-directional running, jumping, and skipping. We’ll also do arm and leg circles. For bilaterality, we’ll drive a spaceship, dribble balls, toss beanbags, and go bowling.
ALWAYS TEACHING
We’ve wrestling with media reports of citizens getting shot and shooting randomly and parents who are being deported. We’ve congratulated ourselves that our children are too little to really be aware of what happened. Then there was this article that really helped to put a perspective on how we can respond. To quote:
“Human life is always an arena of struggle between injustice and justice. There are particular things about the modern predicament – for example, the intrusion of electronic technology, the anonymity in the crowd, the erosion of childhood.
Although children come into the world with an instinct for kindness, it is a lesson that must be reinforced at every turn. Case by case, moment by moment, little by little, a child builds up and recognizes, by watching all the types of responses, what is right or the opposite. You don’t learn these things by what people do on TV or what you read in the newspaper. You learn it because you’ve seen people treated nicely in the sand box, you have a sense of someone’s mom being extraordinarily kind – or otherwise. All of these types of experiences are so clear to a child by the time he gets to kindergarten. It is not too soon – well before kindergarten – to have launched into an ongoing conversation about kindness and fairness and justice that will unspool throughout the child’s growing up years.
By necessity, the most lasting lessons in the moral arena come not in moments set aside for preplanned lectures. Kids always ask moral questions. We can respond by sweeping them under the rug or saying, “It’s controversial. Go ask your father.” That is a way of teaching moral blindness or cowardice. It’s always been handled on the fly – milking the cows, in the car, walking to school. Parents need to understand that when the question gets asked, it’s an important question; don’t shortchange it just because it was asked in the grocery store. It is crucial business, this teaching of how to be good and kind and caring in a changing world. And it is everybody’s business to teach the lessons, not just the terrain of parents or the school. It tests all of us to be teachers – especially when we least expect it. A really scary thing is that if we as caring adults don’t teach, our children will learn from their friends or from concoctions of the media.
Try not to miss any opportunity to sift through the rightness or wrongness of what unfolds, whether the child is the actor or audience in the drama.” No one said it was going to be easy.
Coming Up
Parent/Teacher Conferences – Beginning Monday April 24, we’ll have our parent/teacher conferences; this is the time when you discuss the progress of your child with her teacher. Well begin with the Infant class, they will have their conferences on Monday April 24, the Toddler class will have their conferences on Tuesday and Wednesday April 25 & 26, the Primary class will have their conferences on Thursday, Friday and Monday, April 27, 28 and May 1. Look for the signup forms in the foyer to choose a time when you would like to meet with your child’s teacher. If you are unable to meet during our scheduled times let us know and we can make arrangements to meet at another time.
Team Training – The team member at MMGS have just attended a working shop were we focused on Montessori (The Science Behind The Genius) a book by A.S. Lillard. As a result we have renewed, and refreshed our knowledge and we also learned some new ways of thinking that will help us to improve and be better for the little ones we care so much for every day.
Picture Day – We’ll be taking individual, sibling, and group class pictures on Wednesday May 10. Make sure your child is at school so he’ll be included in the group portrait.
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