Finding a Play-based Preschool

Heather Shumaker wrote an EXCELLENT book entitled It's Ok Not To Share and Other Renegade Rules For Raising Competent and Compassionate Kids. The families in our program recently did a group read and discussion of the book.

Well, today one of my colleagues connected me to a great post by Heather Shumaker entitled, How To Find a True Play-Based Preschool.  Please follow the link and enjoy the post here.

Our parents are lovely!

We held our May monthly parent meeting this evening.

I am so grateful for the wonderful parents who exhibit such great dedication to the growth and development of their children!

We enjoyed a video interview of Bev Bos together. Please watch the video here.

WARNING: the interviewer is funny cheesy and it is geared toward early childhood educators, but our parents agreed that it was great and beneficial for parents of young children just as well!

A little validation for child-directed learning

I am so grateful that this little piece was sent my way today. I have witnessed the same contagious writing explosion in our program over the last several weeks. Each time one of these new waves of development runs through our little school, I am amazed at the children's intrigue and motivation to grow and learn!

Please read this little piece on literacy and development in preschool children!

Play for preschoolers please

This morning I received a link to an article in Huffington Post, entitled Getting Preschool Right.

We are really starting to see more of an understanding of the importance of play in the educational world.

For that I am pleased.

Play in preschool does a world of good!

Cookies in School (and pretzels too!)

As you know if you have been a part of our program, we are very conscious of what we feed the children at our school.  We provide morning and afternoon snack each day that consist of whole wheat breads and muffins (baked at the school) along with a fruit or vegetable and water to drink.

After four years of the same bread rotating through with slight variations each day (blueberry, strawberry, oatmeal, applesauce, banana, etc.), the children have recently become weary of eating the same ol' thing.

So, I set out to discover a way to keep the integrity of our healthy snacks while providing the children with greater variety.

If you are a parent of one of our preschoolers, you may hear that we had cookies for snack from time to time now.  I can assure you...these are not your average white-flour, sugar-loaded cookies. As an example I wanted to provide for you a recipe for the cookies we ate at afternoon snack yesterday.

The Maple Pecan Breakfast Cookies were a hit! 

So if your child mentions cookies for snack, don't panic! Feel free to ask for the recipe!

By the way...we made Soft pretzels today using this recipe...although we used 100% whole wheat flour. Again...they were a hit!