Family Life as Mission Erin Cetera, presenter April 8

THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU!
The parents, grandparents and caregivers of children at Weekday Children's Center recognize the hard work and dedication of the teachers throughout the year. To show our appreciation, we are planning to host a lunch for the teachers on May 7, 2008. The lunch is intended to provide the teachers with a few yummy dishes and desserts to enjoy during the afternoon. Keep an eye out for upcoming flyers and sign-up sheets if you are interested in volunteering food, supplies, time (helping with set-up and/or clean-up), or contributions toward a floral arrangement or gift. We hope that this small effort will go a long way in telling our teachers “Thank You!

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NEWS FROM THE CLASSROOMS

Weekday Children's Center
April Dates to Remember

MORE CLASSROOM NEWS

April 2008

Bits and Pieces

CAN YOU HELP?

8 a.m.-noon. Bring shovels, pitchforks, work gloves, trash bags and the willingness to pitch in! We’ll be spreading mulch, moving sand, and cleaning out the shed. Any time you can give is appreciated!

Registration for Preschool Summer Camp is open now and continues until May 1. This program is open to current Weekday clients.

Watch for flyers and sales packets for our Spring fund raiser-a sale of summer blooming bulbs. Let's hope the weather cooperates and we can all start planting on schedule this year!

Hand in Hand

Being a conscientious, caring parent is a hard job. Knowing that other parents have the same concerns can help you navigate the sometimes rough road. These workshops are designed to address the special concerns of today's parents of young children. Come to all of them, or come to the ones that interest you most. The choice is yours.

All workshops take place in Room 234 at Grace United Methodist Church, 300 E. Gartner Rd. in Naperville from 6:30 to 8:00 PM. Childcare is available. Cost for each workshop is $10/family and advanced registration is recommended. Call 630-355-5495 for more information.

We've been commiserating lately with some parents of soon-to-be-kindergartners as they “recover” from kindergarten round-ups and presentations at local schools. We share some of the concerns about what seem like very high expectations of children.

We also have the professional understanding that your children have had the benefit of a program that takes into account their developmental needs and balances that with their prior experiences and local expectations. Below are quotes from some of the experts we turn to for research and affirmation.

When children manipulate materials in play, they are building a foundation of understanding for the concepts and skills we want them to learn in school. We can't tell children to understand number, for example, by having them copy number symbols onto paper or by reciting the names of numbers. They have to 'discover' for themselves what numbers mean-for example that five unifix cubes and five hats and five blocks are all the same quantity-and this they can only do through hands-on experience with materials. Once children understand the concept of numbers, the symbols such as the number symbol '5' have real meaning because children have constructed this knowledge for themselves, or as Piaget might say, they have 'invented' it. When children construct their ideas through play and hands-on activities that make sense to them, their knowledge builds in a hand-over-hand way that is solid and unshakable. They build a foundation of meaning through play that provides the basis for understanding concepts in language, literacy, math, science, and the arts.

Nancy Carlsson-Paige

The skills a child needs to succeed in most kindergartens are not knowing numbers and letters, but rather being able to communicate, follow instructions, and work cooperatively with other children. These skills seem to be best acquired in preschools that are developmentally and play oriented.

David is Professor Emeritus of Child Development at Tufts University. Some of his best known books are The Hurried Child, All Grown Up And No Place to Go, and The Power of Play: Learning What comes Naturally.

“If formal instruction is introduced too early, too intensely and too abstractly, the children may indeed learn the instructed knowledge and skills, but they may do so at the expense of the disposition to use them.”

I have much more food for thought available from these authors. Let me know if you're interested in copies of longer articles. Erin

Kindergarten class

Here's hoping we're finally done with winter! We've had a touch of warm weather, and this class has definitely got spring fever! We can't wait to spend more time outside. During the month of March, we kept track of the weather by making a weather graph. We counted how many days it snowed, rained, and so on. We also counted down how many days until the first day of Spring!

With spring around the corner it seemed fitting to read Charlotte's Web by E.B.White at our rest time. We enjoyed this so much that after we finished the book, we watched the movie. Also during this month we spent some time learning about dinosaurs. This was, as you might imagine, a big hit with all the boys in our class. We read many books to learn facts about these creatures, and the children we're truly fascinated. When we used a tape measure to demonstrate their actual sizes, it really helped the children to grasp the concept of how big they really were. You might want to ask your child and see if they remember which one was the biggest. We'd have to use the entire tape measure to measure this one!

This month we'll be exploring the changes in our environment that the spring season brings us. We'll be taking a few spring walks to look for signs of new growth. The children have already told me that they want to make a spring mural out in our hallway, so you can look for that soon. We'll also be doing some exploring with water. We'll be doing some sink 'n' float activities including making sink 'n' float Jell-O™. We'll also be continuing on with our Author of the Week books, and we've started a paper chain to keep track of how many books we've read. Everyone's doing great with their independent reading: I've seen much progress.

Have a great month and remember we may still be needing boots at school to get through the messy weather. You also might want to change your child's spare clothes that are kept in their cubbie to spring clothes.

Full Day Child Care
Meg Karl and Lynda Nielson

Welcome back to many of you who did some traveling over Spring Break! We hope you had some sunny, warm times while you were away. And even if you didn't go anywhere, we hope you had a more restful week than usual. We look forward to doing lots of story dictations with your children in the next few weeks as they recount their Spring Break experiences.

Over the past month, the children have shown a real interest in letters, the sounds letters make and writing words. We will continue to foster this interest through their own story dictations, by reading lots of stories together, playing word games and providing other language experiences throughout each day.

As the weather turns warmer and spring storms come and go, we will be exploring some aspects of weather both indoors and out. Making a tornado tube, reading Partly Cloudy with a Chance

of Meatballs by Judi Barrett, running with streamers, and flying windsocks and kites are just a few of the activities your child can look forward to in the month of April.

Please continue to send boots, hats, and mittens or gloves with your child each day. Also, layers of clothing such as a light jacket with a sweatshirt work well at this time of year. We plan to go outside twice each day, and temperatures can vary from morning to afternoon.

Your children have really been enjoying the new equipment and materials in our classroom. The musical instruments from other lands have especially captured their interest. Be sure to watch for new equipment and materials in our outdoor play spaces as well and a fresh new look in our play yard toward the end of this month.

School Age Class

Spring has sprung, and with its coming, we bid farewell to a winter that had overstayed its welcome. Spring is a time of new beginnings and fresh starts.

We had to set some limitations on behavior and establish rules, which were determined as a group, in regards to competitive games and sports in particular.
Many children were having a hard time getting along. Perhaps 'cabin fever' played a role. We had quite a stretch of time when it was difficult to get outside much. Perhaps the changing daily schedule due to the unpredictable weather is to blame. For a couple of weeks, we could tell there was stress about impending ISATs and the week of testing at school. Whatever the reason, we're happy to say that our increased focus on 'getting along' is having a positive effect.

The group is also recovering from losing an hour March 9 when daylight savings time began. They're now settling back in and reestablishing equilibrium and routines in the classroom.

MTW and ThF Preschool classes
Denise Gallagher and Candy Zelle

By the time you read this it will, hopefully, feel like spring and winter will be behind us. As the weather changes you may want to exchange the extra clothing in your child's back pack for warmer weather clothing. Having a change of clothing is a good idea since the sensory table often has water in it and children can get their sleeves wet. They are more comfortable when they can change into something dry. We will soon reopen the outdoor sandbox; the children have been asking when that will happen. With the Quality Counts Grant money we got some great items for outdoor use and hope to use them soon. As the weather warms we will spend more time outside doing dramatic play, art, music, science, and motor activities.

Indoors and outdoors we will explore the reawakening of the animals and flowers, trees, and fruits and vegetables. We will be starting flowers and beans in the room and in the MTW class we will go see the changes to our maple tree. We will all enjoy the flowers that surround the play yard. After the long winter we look forward to the spring changes.

In the MTW class we will continue our phonics games on Tuesdays. We'll finish the alphabet in the last seven weeks of school. (Hard to believe so little time is left!) We are seeing lots of interest, especially since the kindergarten roundups some of the children have attended. Spring stories, finger plays and songs will engage both classes. We are seeing more interest in the ThF class at the cutting table. Your children would love to cut at home, too. We often say “thumb in the thumb hole and fingers all together” to help them remember the correct scissor grasp and we also urge them to put their thumb on the top side when they cut. Old magazines and junk mail are great to cut!

Thanks the Wujek family for all the additions to our ocean exploration. The children loved watching the foam sea creatures emerge in water and the MTW class wrote some great stories about the fun foam shapes.

We would also like to highlight the series of parent workshops that Erin and others will hold this month. Check them out and see if they will be beneficial to you.

March 31-April 4  Spring BreakSchool . Age Full Days.  NO Preschool

Fund Raiser in April

"If we had no winter, the
spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome."

Anne Bradstreet (1612 - 1672)
'Meditations Divine and Moral,' 1655