Hello from the 3’s!
We are excited that Spring is on its way! We have enjoyed our time on the playground, but we sure do want more sunshine! We have been increasing our large muscles and coordination skills by riding the bikes and scooters around on the playground. It has been great to get these out once again!
We want to say thank you to our families for joining us for conferences. We enjoy these times to discuss your child’s development. We also want to give a huge shout out to all the families who made us feel so special during the “Week of the Young Child.” The treats and gifts are very much appreciated. We had a fabulous time doing all the special activities with the children.
Thank you for supporting our book fair! We love the new books for our room!
Leslie and I had a great idea of adding the water table to the classroom. We had each child have their own day to use it due to keeping everyone safe during the pandemic. Well, it was pretty much a flop! The longest amount of time spent at the table was about two minutes. We believe this proves that interactions between peers is very valuable. Building friendships develops social/emotional skills, helps with language development, gives the children a sense of belonging, teaches them to encourage each other, work together cooperatively, be creative together, share each other’s ideas, learn how to take turns, share, and how to have empathy toward one another. Building friendships at a young age is invaluable! Developing strong social/emotional skills and how to use them appropriately in a socially acceptable way will make our world a better place! To help our children build these skills with many friends, we have implemented “area buddies.” We got this idea from our Pyramid Model training. The children are assigned an area to play in and have their photo in the corresponding area with a peer whom they may not normally have interactions with. This gives each child a chance to use their social skills to build new relationships. We have used many ideas from our training in the classroom.
Children, and most people for that matter, enjoy music. We discussed instruments and listened to a variety of music. We even colored to fast and slow music. We talked about the different rhythms and instruments that we hear in a song. Two of our favorites are What a Wonderful World, by Louis Armstrong and Everything’s Gonna Be Alright by Bob Marley. It is such a wonderful thing that there are so many songs that have been put into children’s s books and can easily be found on the web. We love sharing a wide range of music and books with the children in hopes to instill a lifelong love of literacy and music.
Patterning has proven to be a challenging skill. The children are learning how to make a repeating pattern using only two, colored objects. Another math concept that they children dearly love is building with magna tiles. They build fabulous structures and are learning geometry. By connecting the tiles together, they are creating different shapes and sizes. Magna tiles have been a great investment in the children’s overall development!
We are excited to be moving into the new classrooms for interim and summer but along with this excitement can come some apprehension and nervousness. We want to stress how important it is to discuss the upcoming changes with your child and to let them know that it is ok to have different feeling about this change. Please reassure your child that Leslie and I will be their summer teachers and it is going to be a lot of fun having new friends to play with.
As the summer semester approaches, please make sure to check your child’s clothing bucket and switch out clothing for the warmer weather. Also, when the summer session starts, we will be applying sunscreen before outside times. The center will provide sunscreen, but you are welcome to provide your own.
With all the changes this year, we thank each one of you for your patience and support and making this a great semester. We are looking forward to a great interim and summer!
April and Leslie
