MHCP NEWSLETTER SHARING INFORMATION WITH OUR FAMILIES www.medicinehatcommunitypreschool.com February 2015 June Welcome! Community Events February is a busy month. Even We are not having a board with this crazy melt and freeze meeting this month but we are weather we still need to be having a “Save our preschool” able to get the children outside, open house on the 25th from 7- it’s slippery out there please 8pm. We are inviting all the bring outdoor clothing including community organizations we snow pants and boots for could think of to come in and waterproofing and extra provides us some financial help to padding. Ouch. buy a space. Our fundraiser with Don’t forget if you can’t bring your our spring catalogues are out, we recyclables to us you can still hope to sell some pretzel rods for donate directly at Shamrock. Valentine’s Day and we are as As always thank you for always collecting bottles. Don’t choosing our center and it’s forget that we are open all of truly an honor to be part of your reading week but closed on children’s lives. Monday February 16, 2015, for Thank you for all your support. Family Day! “The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life.” Richard Bach Question for our parents??? What activities do you and your family do for family day? Email us a photo! Read more at http://www.brainyq uote.com/quotes/to [Pick the date] [Edition 1, Volume 1] For Your Information… The 2nd is Ground Hog Day The 14th is Valentine’s Day The 16th is Family Day Child Care Income Tax Receipts are ready; get them in person in the office Thank you to everyone who participated in the accreditation surveys we sent out in the last few months. The results are compiled and we emailed out. Your input is greatly appreciated! Need to donate bottles on your own time? Email Lisa and ask for the shed locks’ combination. We used some of our pedagogy funding for improvements to our parent boards, ipods for documentation, coverage for meetings, and a one year subscription to “gotomeeting”. Ask us about utilizing go to meeting for a parent teacher interview! Please let us know you have any questions about us purchasing a space. Or about our re accreditation this year. In the classroom We have started up show and tell again. We will be talking about friendship and kindness. Please check the calendar In The Preschool Room for your child’s show and tell day. We are singing “Where Last Month Reflection are you going” and “Twinkle Twinkle Motor Car”. It was a busy month, and flew by very quickly. We are reading the books “Grumpy Bird”, and “A We are still struggling coming up with our Crankenstein Valentine” “guardrail” rules for gun play and rough and Teacher Directed tumble play in the classroom. So far we have Our student is working on an animal activity with the “you have to ask each other to enter this form children on Thursdays. We will also have nursing students of play” and “they must be on their knees for here for a practicum piece focusing on child wrestling moves. Not much we know but we development. They will each only attend a day and a half are working on it with the children. The each over the next two months. . children as per usual are honing their Lego Art building and perler bead creation skills. Coloring snow. We will take out the yellow paint, and put (melties) We have had quite a bit of interest out the heart tracers in honor of valentine’s day. with planes, talking about how they fly, making planes and flying them around. We Science We tried a dancing raisin experiment. For this month we received a huge box of ties last month. It was are going to figure out how to make pipe cleaners dance. tie-poolazooza in the dress up center. Playing with hammers, golf tees and Styrofoam… for . science..lol. Wishlist Lunchable containers No Birthdays! Large packing styrofoam WHY WE DON’T HAND OUT VALENTINES! Our goal is to teach children about feelings, and to treat others kindly and respectfully. Two-year-olds are just beginning to understand that other people even have feelings. It is not obvious to them that hurting someone else can feel the same as being hurt. We continually encourage them not to hit or bite and to use their words. For older children, it means understanding words can hurt and that there are appropriate and inappropriate words you can use. 4-year-olds do not understand that yelling “I hate you” or “I am going to kill you” is not the best way to communicate. They do not have a real concept of what these words mean. Secondly, we do not love indiscriminately. Children know this, in part because they already know some children they don’t love. It’s the children who are interested in different things, wants to play differently or too rough, or says things that hurt their feelings. Adults have similar feelings, so why should we impose different standards on our children? Ultimately we want children to treat everyone with Birthdays respect and give them a chance, but we also want them to be careful and understand the commitment of whom they love is a serious thing. If we encourage children to say “I love you” to everyone it will not lay the groundwork for critical thinking about their future relationships. 6th on the So what is appropriate forNash a preschool child? Valentine’s Day is a wonderful time to start discussions with children. Discussions about what makes each member a family what you admire about each other, what would make a family member feel Danyaofon the special, 9th appreciated? Discuss appropriate tokens of love—a special dish that someone loves to eat, a picture you create, a family outing. Ask them who they like to play with and help them figure out what it is that they like about those people. Not only does this help your child begin to think about what others add to their lives; it also helps you begin to understand a child’s personal preferences. As adults we should share our own feelings with children, it will only serve to help them understand their own feeling. So please no Valentines this year. New songs we are learning… “Frere Jacques” In the Younger Preschool Room “Slippery Fish” Last month reflection New books we are reading… “Panda Bear, Panda Bear” Books in French from the library In the Classroom We want to study France and speaking French. Counting in French. Singing songs in French. Seeing the flag, painting with white We tried out quite a few different things. Painting on tinfoil, learning about textures, we tried out contact paper, we practiced “rolling” out the playdough, put some yummy cinnamon in our rice table and gelation in the water table. We read books in Spanish, learning colors in Spanish, and we played with some special Mexican sombreros. Thanks Hilda for bringing us a taste of Mexican culture. and blue. We will also be making a huge gelatin sheet and cutting it out with cookie cutters. Art and Sensory Play In honor of Valentine’s day we may bust out WISH LIST some hearts and loveable art materials. Lids and caps Birthdays Lucas on the 7th In the Infant Toddler room… Last month reflection No Birthdays… The children were happy to explore a variety of sensory tables this New songs we are learning… month. Water, snow, rice, and a festive new year’s theme with “I Can Do So Many Things” streamers, ribbons, string, feathers, stars and noisemakers. We made “I Had A Little Rooster” some spectacular shadow puppets on the wall with our hands and New book we are reading… whole bodies. Everyone enjoyed building, stacking and rolling tin cans. January was definitely the month of music as we played with rain sticks, our drums, clapping, the bells and so so much dancing. With low numbers mostly due to colds, and teething the infant room was spoiled with lots of one on one interactions. “Sandbox” “Is This My Nose” Sensory Play Found materials pinecones and the beautiful mess to make bird feeders. Pudding painting and sponge painting In the Classroom WISH LIST We are going to concentrate on Jello some more sensory play. And we Mix will also be creating a variety of collages. Maybe even bust out some jello play. Helping our families understand Accreditation… “Licensing provides a legislated 'floor' below which child care or out-of-school care programs are not permitted to operate. It typically includes factors such as space, range of equipment, number and ages of children, staff/provider-child ratios and training requirements for staff/providers. Such factors contribute to quality, but are only minimum standards. Accreditation builds on this legislated "floor" to look at factors that determine quality. The emphasis is on staff/provider practices and actual outcomes for children and families. It shifts the focus from meeting minimum standards to continuously striving towards providing higher levels of care.” Alberta Association for the Accreditation of Early Learning and Care Services mission is to accredits and promote excellence in Alberta early learning and child care programs enhancing the quality of service provided to children birth - 12 years of age, families and professionals. – www.aelcs.ca We are an accredited program. This means we met all of the requirements as set out in the AELCS standards. To maintain our accredited status. We have to provide to AELCS a review of our program annually and submit a report, an updated Quality Enhancement Plan reflecting updates on our goals, receive feedback from staff and families and implement response to that feedback and continually update our portfolio, our policies and provide documentation to show our programming abilities. For accreditation we need to have examples and proof of how we meet the criteria. These can be photos, newsletters, policies, surveys ect… any documentation that shows our due diligence. We also need our quality enhancement plan. This is a living document that provides unaccomplished goals to meet each accreditation standards. These goals are decided based on our program philosophies, any feedback we receive as well as from professional development opportunities we are inspired by. Ask us to see the QEP we will gladly show you our goals. We also maintain extra policies for accreditation in our handbooks, different types of checklists around the room and large programming binders to document how we implement our interest, need, ability programming in our classrooms. Also once every three years we have to go through the application process again and pass re accreditation. We are doing that again this year our deadline is June 12, 2015. But we will have to be finished prior to that to schedule in our site visit from validators at AELCS. We need to make sure that we have lots of time to solve any issues they think or we think we may have. Also, AELCS has implemented a new system so it’s a bit more work. You can help us by providing feedback to us about how our program is doing, completing surveys when they are sent out, making suggestions for our policies, asking questions about our program and volunteering or being on our board of directors. Or if you have some time on your hands let us know we could use another team member to help us type transfer information and make some observations for our notes and comments. If you want to know more about accreditation standards go to www.aelcs.ca