Congratulations!
A big congrats to Una, Katie and DJ on their new baby! Welcome to the world, Maya James! We cannot wait to see more of you once you are home!
ABCs
This week we concluded our journey through the alphabet; I hope that it has brought more interest in letters and words. Please know that everyone is still very young for understanding all of the alphabet, letter recognition, and even writing letters. So if your child isn’t prepared for those concepts yet, don’t worry! We will keep revisiting the ABCs during our daily meetings.
May 1st - Self portraits!
One of my favorite parts of each month is when the children are able to make their self portrait again. This is a momentous journey during the 2’s year especially. We start off the school year with small marks, frenzied scribbles, and harsh dots and pokes of the marker. During this point in the year, we are starting to see some actual human-ish portraits emerge from the scribbles. Most children are able to make circles and clear lines by this stage. Now they are putting these new developments together to create a face.
Please share your child’s portrait if you have a moment - they are special to me and I would love to see the new developments in your child’s fine motor capabilities.
Music
Eudenis and I have been working hard on creating new music provocations for the children to work on at home. The study of music is important. It helps foster language acquisition, keeps children engaged when they otherwise would lose interest, and even has a lot of mathematical concepts. Playing music in the background while children are working is also a great tool for focus and attention span. And of course upbeat music helps us relax and unwind and get out silly energy. We literally have music on all day at school, and when we forget we can see a very obvious change in behavior.
Guessing Games
This week we started to play some fun animal-based guessing games. Giving a few clues about habitat, sounds, color of fur and patterns, we tasked the children with using their amazing cognitive abilities to figure out what animal I was describing. This is a fun game to play at home, too! You can even reverse the game and put a sticker on your forehead and try to have your child give you clues as to what it is. It will take some practice, but it’s fun and a great way to get those little minds focused!
Next Week
Next week we have some fun events coming up: Teacher appreciation, Cinco de Mayo, Parents day, and India’s 3rd birthday! Have your calendar ready so you can remember all of our events and get your child excited and in a routine each day.
If you have special dates or events that you’d like for us to add, please let me know. I’m happy to include even more on our calendar.