SHOW AND TELL
Bring pictures of things you will have – or would like to have – for Thanksgiving dinner.
Topic: Pilgrims
Thanksgiving for our great abundance
The value is wisdom, which is the ability to judge rightly and follow the best course of action.
For manners we’ll learn about table manners, receiving gifts, and making introductions.
Outside we’ll play turkey roundup.
The songs we’ll be singing are It’s a Small World, We Shall Overcome, High Hopes, Happy Talk, and Ten Little Indians. We’ll also move, clap, and breathe to the songs we’re learning.
Our art activities are corn prints, thankful turkey, Indian headbands, dinner collage, and yarn turkey.
Creative dramatics will be using our Pilgrim and Indians puppets to dramatize working, learning to read, eating dinner, or having Thanksgiving. .
For motor development we’ll build coordination with walking along an Indian trail and bouncing beach balls. For body development, we’ll work on bilaterality with hopping, hot potato, hopscotch, and side slide.
MAKING THE FUTURE
When we study what’s going on with teenagers, there are many cues for how to start now to develop family values we think are important. In researching high-achieving students, one-third say family is most important in life, 18% say friends, and 6% say money. Eighty percent of the students whose families eat together say their home life is happy. Those who rarely or never eat dinner together are four times more likely to engage in sexual behavior than those whose families eat dinner together regularly. Here at the school, we consciously work on skills we think are ultimately important for our children to have. Here are some:
- Make a request – This includes getting attention and asking for help. The child is to wait until a break in the conversation, address the person from whom she needs help, and then specifically state the request. The adult’s responsibility is to acknowledge the child’s request and deal with it. This may be “We need to talk about that later because I’m talking with Joe right now.”
- Disagree – This includes giving negative feedback and how to say “No”. The child is taught to give an empathetic response, “I know it’s time to go to bed.” Then he must state his disagreement very specifically, “I want to stay here 15 more minutes,” and then give his rationale, “So I can finish building my car.” By allowing your child to verbalize his own needs, someday he will be much more competent in refusing one more beer or staying up too late.
- Apologize – Already our children are learning to help those they have hurt. We do not require children to say, “I’m sorry”, but we do help them empathize with the offended person’s feelings. This is the beginning of true contrition. At that point, “I’m sorry,” has meaning.
- Compliment – Our children are taught how to compliment, “Your dress is pretty.” The MMGS team try to appreciate non-material qualities about the children, “What a happy face you have today,” or qualities of a new possession, “Your new shoes look like they can run really fast.”
• Report peer behavior – Our children are taught to report very specifically. If the offense doesn’t require adult intervention, the response might be” “What could you do about that?” Many times, tattle-tale behavior is really asking for a judgment from the adult to help the reporting child understand whether the reported behavior is acceptable or not and what the consequences of the behavior are.
On the Calendar
Party Manners Day – It is the time of year when we prepare the children for life skills they’ll need during the holidays. The children come dressed in their finest holiday clothes on Thursday, Nov. 21. They stay clean all day, learn to say “No, thank you” for foods that look unappetizing to them, and compliment the cook. You might want to think about what customs you want your family to have, and begin preparing your children at home to be socially adept with all the unusual routines of the holidays.
Harvest Festival – Look for the sign-up sheet in the foyer to list the food you’ll be bringing. You can drop your food off in the morning and we’ll do the rest. Plan on being at the school for lunch from 11:30 – 12:30, you can make as much food as you like nothing will go to waste; if you can spare 30min. please hang around to fill to-go containers with the leftover food that will feed hungry and homeless families. We will wash your dish and have it ready by pick up time, everyone is welcomed to attend. Make sure to get your picture taken for our memory picture wall.
Thanksgiving Holiday – The school will be closed Wednesday, Nov. 27, through Friday, Nov. 29, as we pause to be grateful for all the wonderfulness of our lives.
classroom news
In the infant class Mateo likes to help, when the teacher asked, “where are Audrey’s shoes?” Mateo takes it upon himself to find the shoe and hand it to Audrey.
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