SHOW AND TELL
Bring a simple machine.
(Think egg beater, hammer, or pliers.)
Topic: Machines
How machines make our work easier
The value is self-reliance, which is confidence in your own ability.
For cooking we’ll make orange/banana shakes with our machine.
Outside we’ll make bubble sculptures and a city scape.
The songs we’ll be singing are Wheels on the Bus, It’s a Small World, One Hammer, Do Your Ears Hang Low?
For creative dramatics we’ll be a machine, an eggbeater, sticky popcorn, play train, mix it up, and thread the needle.
Our art activities are painting with wheels, cars and trucks, and painting with stencils.
For motor development, we’ll work on flexibility with yoga poses. We’ll also work on breathing and relaxing. For vestibular function we’ll play roll, hop, gallop, and skip. We’ll also spin, roll like a log and a rollie/pollie, and hang upside down on the chinning bar.
INDEPENDENCE
From Maria Montessori in The Absorbent Mind: “For the essence of independence is to be able to do something for one’s own self. The philosophical concept which underlies the successive conquest of independence is this: That man achieves his independence by making efforts. To be able to do a thing without any help from others, this is independence. If it exists, the child can progress rapidly; if it does not, his progress will be slow. With these ideas in mind, we can see how the child must be treated. Although our natural inclinations are all toward helping him in his endeavors, Montessori philosophy teaches us never to give more help than is absolutely necessary. The child who wants to walk by himself must be allowed to try, because what strengthens any developing power is practice, and practice is still needed after the basic power has been attained. If a child is always carried in someone’s arms, his development is not being helped but hindered. Directly after independence has been reached, the adult who keeps on helping becomes an obstacle. It is clear that we must not carry the child about, but let him walk, and if his hand wishes to work we must provide him with things on which he can exercise an intelligent activity. His own actions are what take the little one along the road to independence.”
There is a lovely story in a classic Montessori film about the child who was watching a butterfly break out of its chrysalis. The child watched patiently for a while but then could no longer sit idly by, and he reached out to free the struggling butterfly. For a minute the butterfly sat on the child’s finger, but when the butterfly tried to fly, it fluttered helplessly because its wings had not been strengthened by the struggle to emerge. The butterfly fell to the ground and died.
In our classrooms, we constantly guard against the urge to help our little ones, understanding that much help is actually a hindrance. The rules in our classrooms are:
- Never correct. Only help the child toward positive action.
- Expect the child to do things slowly, even badly. When the child asks for help, give only constructive help to show him how. Do not do for the child what he should learn to do for himself. Your purpose is to show the child how to learn. It may take a long time.
- Help the child do things she should not or cannot do for herself, such as get materials from a high shelf, lift something too heavy for her, or loosen a knot that is too tight.
- Be patient. Do not show disapproval or anger.
Like all simple things, these are harder to do than they seem. But for the strength and the competence that we want for our little ones, we must.
For Your Information
Picture Day - We’ll be taking individual and sibling portraits on Tuesday October 3, we’ll begin taking pictures around 8 A.M.
Oracy Skills – The beginning of literacy is to be able to understand language. In the theme on Machines in our enrichment curriculum, the children will be learning many vocabulary words they may not hear in your regular at-home conversations, like pulley, sprocket, fulcrum, cam, lever, and crank. For our children to be comfortable with STEM words, we want them also to know these mechanical terms. See if you can work them into your week, maybe as you choose a show-and-tell item to bring. Be sure to enunciate clearly.
Amazing Athletes – The students in the primary class enjoy and have been benefiting from our multi-sport program for years now Amazing Athletes offering this program to the toddler class. If you did not get an enrollment form please speak with your child’s teacher
Classroom News
In the infant 2 class Ellie amazed us as she worked with her teacher on the rainbow stacking work. While her class mates, Max and Petar sat on the floor and observed, Ellie was asked to select the dark blue circle and she did, after correctly picking all the other colors including light and dark green we praised her achievement with hand claps and smiles. The rainbow stacking work helps in improving the attention span, hand-eye coordination and color recognition.
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