Whole Child Development
My mom has always said that she hated Mother’s Day. Especially as a young mom. She says that every Mother’s Day, she would go to church and hear people speak about how wonderful, selfless, patient, and kind mothers are. How sacred their role is and how God-like they are. This was all intended to honor mothers and elevate the role of motherhood. What my mother came away with, however, was a gut full of guilt. She never felt she measured up to that idyllic “Mother’s Day Mom”.
My mom has always said that she hated Mother’s Day. Especially as a young mom. She says that every Mother’s Day, she would go to church and hear people speak about how wonderful, selfless, patient, and kind mothers are. How sacred their role is and how God-like they are. This was all intended to honor mothers and elevate the role of motherhood. What my mother came away with, however, was a gut full of guilt. She never felt she measured up to that idyllic “Mother’s Day Mom”.
I facilitated a training session with a group of preschool teachers recently, and as I was transcribing a list they had created of social skills they wish every child had, I couldn’t help but wonder if a few of them could be applied more frequently to ourselves as adults as well. Here are the ones that caught my eye. [Read more…]
Here’s a quick one I’m quite sure you can take and improve on! For your flower theme, create an interactive bulletin board or flannel board activity by creating flower centers with the written numeral and corresponding number of dots. Then provide flower petals for the children to count out and place around the center, matching the dots in a one-to-one ratio. This activity supports preschool math skills like numeral recognition, counting, color recognition, and even patterning if they choose to use it that way!
Here’s a quick sensory table idea for your unit on plants, seeds, flowers, or gardens. Fill your sensory bin with soil – either right out of the bag, or right out of the ground. Add some pansy pony packs, hand tools, magnifiers, a few small containers with water, gloves, and even worms if you’re feeling extra organic! Let the children plant the flowers in the bin, examining the roots as they go. If they want to pull the flowers apart, examining their parts, that’s OK too!
“I just need more patience!” It’s a statement I hear from teachers and parents quite frequently. While there’s no magic pill for patience, there are a few things we can remember that help us muster up a bit more patience. Here is an article I wrote WAY back at the beginning of this blog, originally titled, Patience Comes From Understanding:
Photo provided by mikkimoo.
When doing a study of seeds, plants, flowers, and gardens with children, the obvious, absolutely best activity is actually growing something from a seed! The transformation is magical and empowering to those little ones, and the applied activity really reinforces all they’ve learned about the needs of plants, and how they grow. Here are a few of my favorite planting activities!
Learning is risky business. Think about it. Anytime we try something new, we are destined to fail before we can succeed. A child’s first steps often end with a fall. Scraped knees and colorful bruises are the tuition many children pay as they learn to ride a bike. And no child ever picked up her first book and read it cover to cover. When we invite children to learn something new, we are indeed inviting them to be brave enough to fail, so that they can learn to succeed.
I just wanted to share some photos from the experiment we did after reading The Empty Pot (details on the experiment here). I used pea seeds since they’re nice and large…..and because I already had them on hand, seeing as how I’m way behind on actually getting them in the ground. Here’s the difference between the two samples after about a week’s time.
When exploring seeds, plants, and gardens, it’s great to mix in some seeds with this classic finger-paint recipe. Here, I used culinary seeds, since I had them on hand. I used fennel seed in the green, sesame seed in the yellow, and poppy seed in the blue. (As a side note, it’s fun to use two primary colors and the secondary color they create as a trio of paints for an activity. The mixing and blending is exciting!)
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