What a Wonderful Sight

I hope that the holiday season provided each of you with the chance to enjoy your family, and spend quality time together.

What a wonderful treat the snow on Christmas was. If you stayed home hopefully there was time for snowmen building, and playing in the snow! Always a nice delight to see the toddler’s reaction to the snow falling!

In December, the toddlers focused on some new Holiday themed works. Some of these included hanging candy canes, using tongs to move snowmen around, decorating a tree, spinning dreidels, and matching holiday themed erasers.  A nice chance to use different materials to work on some everyday skills that the toddlers are working on like building better eye hand coordination, counting, and a one to one correspondence.  

The month of December also allowed the toddlers to create some unique ornaments for their families. They got to choose their own cookie cutter shape, and the colors of beads they wanted to fill it with.  Once the cookie cutter was filled we put these shapes into the oven and melted the beads into a wonderful mixture of colors that let the light shine through them.  The toddlers took great pride in being able to share these with everyone around them.  They also made these ornaments for some staff around our school who help to make their day special.  Some of the older toddlers took turns delivering these to staff, and saying Happy Holidays!  A wonderful opportunity to build thankfulness, and appreciation into the toddler’s world.  

With the New Year we will be adding some new friends to our classroom, which always presents an exciting experience.  As our next-door infant classroom starts to have some older infants this provides the opportunity for the toddlers to interact with new friends who are younger than them, and gives them a chance to work on respecting the space and abilities of others.  Such a joy to watch these older infants transition into younger toddlers!

January also means a focus on some more core toddler developmental skills. These include stringing beads, sorting small, medium and large items, catching and throwing balls, as well as working on balancing.  This month is a great time to collect more observations on the toddlers to aid in some detailed progress reports, which will be discussed with parents in conferences in February. Looking forward to meeting with each other!  

​Here's to a wonderful New Year!

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