SHOW AND TELL
Bring your address (maybe just the street) so we can learn to say our names and addresses.
Topic: Social Professions
These are those professions that we could do ourselves, but we choose to pay someone else to do them for us.
They include accountants, carpenters, and hairdressers.
The work adults do
The value is justice, which means that we be fair to everyone.
For safety, we’ll learn ways to be safe at school, at home, and when we visit other places.
Outside, we’ll paint the town.
The songs we’ll be singing are John Jacob Jingleheimerschmidt, He’s Got the Whole World, When You Wish Upon a Star, One Hammer, and Take Me Out to the Ballgame.
For creative dramatics, we’ll pantomime one-step and then multiple-step activities.
Our art activities are water pictures, electrician’s sculpture, paper plate clown, and what surface is this?
For motor development, we’ll work on coordination by jumping laterally, up and down steps, and then standing on first one foot and then on the other.
For proprioception, we’ll play choo-choo train, backward get-up, crawling on our backs, and palm push.
JUST BE THERE FOR ME
Ellen Galinsky, president of Families and Work Institute, has turned her research to ask children what they think. What a revolutionary approach! She uses children from ages 8 to 18, first because they’re young enough to remember, then because they’re verbal enough to express their thoughts and emotions. After all this time she has come to the conclusion that we’re asking the wrong questions. It has nothing to do with whether mom works or not. It has to do with how the children are parented. According to her research, most parents think their children would wish for more time with parents. Au contraire. Only 10% of children would wish for more time with their mothers. About 15% would wish for more time with their fathers. Older kids tended to want more time with their parents than younger children. When you get to the point that you have a sulking, rebellious teenager, remember this.
But check this out. Fully 27% wish their parents were less stressed out and another 23% wish their parents had more money so they didn’t have to worry so much about financial issues. Children were incredibly sensitive to what kind of day their parents had, going so far as to say that if their parent had a bad day, they would be extra careful to be totally “good” so as not to be an extra burden on their parents!
So what do we do with this information? Galinsky reminds us of a pretty standardly accepted triangle that stress is directly related to (1) job demands and pressure (not hours), (2) the amount of control you have in your job, and (3) the amount of support you get. Support can be spousal, family, friends, co-workers, and child care. All of these things are pretty immediately within our control, if not directly at least with an attitude shift. Some other great points from Galinsky:
o Kids think we don’t like work very much. Which means they don’t like work either, like school and chores. They follow what we do, not what we say. So if we want things different here, we’re going to have to demonstrate a different attitude about going to work and about chores. FYI: It’s a pretty simple shift to think “I get to go to work” instead of “I have to go to work”.
o Parents really don’t have much of a clue what’s going on in their kids’ lives. Kids want their parents to be involved in school, sports, extracurricular, and in their child’s inner life. Kids want parents to ask their child big questions, like “What do you think about that”, “How did that make you feel”, and “What could be done to make it better for you”. Not too different from what our spouses and friends want from us.
o Kids want to know that their parents are there for them, loving them no matter what, listening when they talk, and just hanging around. Over and over we hear, it’s not the big stuff like special trips or birthday parties, but the goodnight ritual or sending off in the morning that means so much. Our kids talked. Are we listening?
In General
Toddler Tips – Toddler teachers realize you’ve been in a grown-up world for a while, but they wish you would let your little one participate a little more. Specifically, get a drink (use a step stool), make the salad (tear the lettuce), don’t shoo them out, and go really slow when you’re showing them how to do it. Mostly what they do is okay. Torn lettuce still tastes the same, and spilled drinks are easy to clean up if a towel is available for little hands. They need to practice, and they need the self confidence that you know they can do it.
Enrichment Curriculum – You might notice some of the enrichment curriculum topics are sometimes being repeated this is an effort to make sure all the students get the need exposure to the subjects
Use Your Words – In the classroom and on the playground children in the primary class are being encouraged to use their words to express themselves. When one child no longer want to play instead of crying to the teacher “Jason keeps chasing me” the student is asked to “use your words” often the teacher giving them the words to use, “Jason I don’t want to play anymore stop chasing me.” This helps to empower our students and resolve conflict without the need for an adult.
CLASSROOM NEWS
Bowie can name most of the letters in the alphabet so we are taking it to the next step and encouraging Bowie to practice his writing by using the sand paper letter as guide and writing the letters on a small chalk board and in addition giving him the correct sounds of various letters in preparation for reading.
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