The Prepared Adult and Enabling Healthy Eating Habits

By Claire Nguyen, Toddler Directress

Over the past couple of months, on-the-go eating has been replaced with exclusively at-home meals. For many families, being home together all day may feel like navigating uncharted waters. The three daily meals and snacks in between have become the markers that break up ours and our children’s days in a new way. While this time obviously comes with a laundry list of new challenges, it also presents the opportunity to enable a healthy relationship with food, especially for our most impressionable toddlers.

The adults are laying the foundations for the child's relationship with food and for good eating habits. The adult decides where, when, and what the child will eat. It would be ideal to set up the kitchen so the child can be independent, as well as involved in the meal preparation. Children have more interest in food when they are part of the preparation of the meal, and they can learn to get a drink when needed if they can reach a water source by themselves.

WHERE TO EAT:
Establishing a place to eat is important for the young child. It is also important to set a rule that food and beverages stay at the table and we eat at the table, not play. It is ideal to eat meals together as a family but to not expect the young child to sit at the table until everyone is finished. If the toddler is finished, you can say "I see you are finished, you may be excused" or you could offer the words for them to ask "May I please be excused?" The adult may assist him/her to clean up their spot and take their plate to the kitchen/sink area.

Sometimes, the young child will walk away from the table with food or utensil in their hand. When that occurs, the adult can say, "I'll keep the food/utensil at the table. It's okay for you to go." If they would like to keep eating, they need to sit back down at the table with the food/utensil. If not, model clearing things away to show that by leaving, they are choosing to be finished.

WHEN TO EAT:
It's best to keep with the daily rhythm/routine and offer meals at regular times during the day, rather than having the kitchen open at all hours. Providing three meals a day (breakfast, lunch, dinner) and perhaps a small snack in the morning and/or the afternoon.

WHAT TO EAT:
As the adult, you can decide what food you'd like your family to eat. For some families, only one option is offered but for others, two options are offered to the child that they find acceptable. Toddlers are not yet capable of making good food choices completely by themselves but will learn based on what's modeled and offered to them.

When it comes down to it, this surplus of meals together with our children is also a surplus in opportunities to teach our children, to grow healthy with our children, but most importantly to love our children. Savor the conversations and the bonding that these meals can present!

Planting the Seed of the Pascal Mystery in the Heart of the Young Child

Written by Jennifer Ashton, Primary Directress

“it is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.” Matthew 13:32

In the Children’s House, the announcement of Our Lord’s death is always proclaimed in conjunction with His rising. We would never just say that Jesus died on the cross without also saying He rose and will come again! Even when a child comes to us and says, Jesus died on the cross, we would immediately fill in the remaining...and He is risen! We do this for two reasons, first being that death alone can be scary for a young child, but also to lift up the Pascal Mystery of death and resurrection.

The month of March has brought a seed planting work to the shelves, as we prepare for our Outdoor Garden in the spring. We are raising little perennial flowers to start indoors and will later transplant outdoors when there is no chance of frost! Raising perennial flowers from seed helps the children to further ponder the Pascal Mystery as they witness the growth of the plant and the transformation of the seed. When we plant a seed and it grows it does not just become a bigger seed! The seed changes and must “die” in order for plant to grow. We know that the death of the seed is not the end but the beginning of a new life for this flower. The further beauty of perennials, is that this flower will return to us year after year and produce an abundance of flowers in years to come. This leads us to later ponder with the children the strength that hides within the seed, and where that strength comes from.  The children joyfully respond they know this strength comes from God! We present an open ended question for them to meditate on, “if God would give a seed this kind of strength, imagine the strength that is inside of us!”

Perennial gardeners have a lovely little rhyme about planting from seed...”first year sleeps, second year creeps, third year leaps!” What I love most about this rhyme is how accurately it describes the development of the 3 to 6 year old child in the classroom. The first year they are with us, parents and teachers alike are left to ponder together the secret of childhood: all that is hidden and sleeping within, the second year we get these glimmers of what they know, what has been developed within them already and what we still need to support to aid them in fully realizing their potential. The third year brings out our great leaders and we see the children leaping into that potential! Our 3rd year children are showing all the signs of this greatness within as they are preparing to shed their seed and burst forth with beauty and grace in the garden!

As we prepare for the Easter Season, keep in mind what a rich activity gardening at home can be! It is an excellent way to bring Scripture into your every day life, a way to introduce responsibility and help prevent wastefulness and also a way to demonstrate the wondrous effects that can result from diligence and patience.

Paving the Way to Penmanship: A Montessori Approach to Handwriting

Handwriting or penmanship; no matter what you call it, it was likely an important part of your early education.  Pressured by time and content constraints, many schools have abandoned explicit handwriting instruction. This is resulting in a generation of children who do not know how to write in cursive, and who sometimes even struggle to form legible printed letters.

A number of scientific studies point to the importance of handwriting, including this one which concluded that handwriting (as opposed to typing or tracing) guides preliterate children toward developing reading skills.  

Interested in learning more about the scientific evidence that supports the importance of teaching handwriting as a skill?  Check out this article that highlights five of the important reasons we should not allow direct instruction in this area to go by the wayside.  Not only does learning handwriting early help children develop skills needed for reading, evidence suggests it makes children better writers, spellers, and leads them towards future success in academics.  Higher brain density and gray matter volume have been connected to high-quality handwriting, suggesting that frequent practice may aid in neural processing. Studies also conclude that it is critical for teachers to model the correct way to form letters, but also to utilize direct instruction.

In Montessori schools, handwriting is a critical component of children’s learning.  As with so many other skills, our curriculum takes a spiraling approach, indirectly preparing children prior to direct instruction.  Very young children develop the muscles necessary for a pincer grasp while they manipulate materials such as the knobbed cylinders, a Montessori favorite!  

There are two other important materials in the primary classroom that facilitate handwriting readiness: the metal insets and the sandpaper letters.

The metal insets are wooden trays that hold a series of stencil-like shapes.  Removable shapes are blue with a pink background. Some shapes have straight-lined sides while others are curved.  Children trace the shapes with a pencil, giving their hands a chance to practice creating a variety of lines. Increasingly challenging activities encourage children to create different patterns with colored pencils while staying inside the original traced lines.  At first glance, this may appear to be a fun art activity (which it certainly is!) but its main intention is to prepare children for their upcoming work in handwriting.

Montessori sandpaper letters take the work a step further.  Twenty-six wooden tiles are adorned with gritty, sand-textured letters of the alphabet.  Children are given lessons on how to trace these letters with their fingers and say the sound.  (As a side note, Montessori children are taught the sound of each letter in conjunction with its name, which makes much more sense for reading preparation.)  Perhaps you have observed this in a Montessori classroom; if you have not, we highly suggest coming in to watch the magic of this work in person.

Interestingly, children who attend Montessori schools are typically able to write even before they have begun to read.  Once they do begin reading, these previously developed skills allow them to seamlessly work on the various components of literacy development simultaneously.

Once children enter the elementary years in a Montessori school, they are required to write throughout the day.  Typically, children work throughout the three-hour work period in the morning on a largely independent basis, unless they are receiving a direct, small-group lesson from the guide.  During this independent work they record parts of what they do in notebooks. For example, if a child uses a card material to learn about the internal body functions of a fish (how they perform the tasks of respiration, circulation, movement, and so on), they will record at least part of this work in their notebook.  For example: “Circulation. Fish have two chambers in their hearts.” This writing continues throughout the day and is directly connected to other content children are learning.

Some classrooms include direct handwriting practice even in the elementary years.  This is typically something for children to copy in their notebooks, such as a poem or a paragraph about something they recently had a lesson on.

One final and very important reason to teach handwriting: when children learn how to form beautiful letters early on, they are better able to focus on a myriad of other things.  For example, when writing a story, they can actually think about their story ideas instead of belaboring over how to write a ‘q’.  

Interested in learning more?  As mentioned earlier, we encourage you to come visit the school and observe in one of our classrooms.  Doing so is common practice in Montessori schools, is unobtrusive to the children, and can provide excellent insight for those who are looking to learn more about this unique educational approach.