SHOW AND TELL
Bring a picture of a desert or a savannah thing.
Topic: Deserts/Grasslands
How plants and animals adapt to their biome
The value is humility. It’s good to be humble because there is so much in our world to learn.
For science, we’ll learn how plants grow differently depending on where they grow.
Outside, we’ll play follow the leader and keep the balloon up.
The songs we’ll be singing are Edleweiss, The Green Grass Grows All Around, On Top of Old Smoky, Home on the Range, and Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.
For creative dramatics, we’ll pretend to be a seed.
Our art activities are play dough cactus, leaf lotto, plant people, and plant picture book.
For motor development, we’ll work on flexibility with yoga postures. For proprioception we’ll play tug-of-war, leap frog, bulldozer, leg pushes, and textured highway.
TEN PRINCIPLES
Magda Gerber has been working with infants and toddlers for decades. She has developed ten principles for working with these tiny children that we can use to guide our daily activities. Like all valid principles, they seem to apply to different situations, and they seem to hold true year after year. Notice your own interactions with your little one (no matter how old) and see if they stand these tests:
- Involve your child in the things that concern him. This means to talk with your child about what is happening to him or what you’re doing on his behalf. Teach him the skills he needs to function in his world. Allow your child to feed himself, dress himself, and schedule his private time.
- Invest in quality time. There are three kinds of time from the child’s perspective: the adult wants something, the adult wants nothing, and shared activities. Quality time occurs when the adult has prepared an environment where “the adult wants something” is minimized. When “the adult wants nothing”, the child can learn unencumbered. “Shared activities” is a mutual enjoying time between the child and the adult.
- Learn the child’s unique way of communicating and teach her your way. We expect that our way is the only way, and any other way is deficient. Value your child’s way as valuable and useful.
- Commit to invest the time and effort required to build the total person the child is to become. Everything living is trouble and everything worth having takes effort.
- Respect the child as a worthy person. We tend to treat our children as objects in the environment. We diaper, feed, put to sleep, and command as if this were not really a person. A test is to consider how you might act toward this person if she were 25 years old, a being more nearly your equal. This becomes really accusing when we consider how we laugh at a child who has spaghetti all over her face, at a child who is frightened of jumping off the side of the pool into your arms, or at a child who is trying to communicate a thought and uses the wrong words.
- Be honest about your feelings, both with yourself and with your child.
- Model the behavior you want.
- Recognize problems as learning opportunities and let the child try to solve her own problems.
- Build trust by being consistent.
- Treasure each phase. They pass so quickly you’ll hardly realize that they’re gone.
Classroom News
Marian and Kenneth asked for a lesson on the number rods. The Number Rods introduce the children to quantity 1–10 and their corresponding number names. Through exploration with the material, the child also develops concepts in sequence of number, combinations of 10 and basic arithmetic. The material consists of 10 wooden rods, divided into units by alternating colors of red and blue, progressing in 10 equal steps from 10 cm to 1 meter.
Bowie is already familiar with the number cards and counters material, during a class demonstration Bowie showed his classmates how to do the math centered work. This activity gives the child practice counting quantities up to 10. It also introduces the child to the concept of odd an even numbers.
In conjunctions with the enrichment curriculum on science professions the primary students were exposed to new words, laboratory, experiment, scientist, chemist, and biologist. Attention spans were limited parents might want to go over these words at home.
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