Home Sweet Home Preschool enjoyed an unbelievable 14 families at our February 23rd Recruitment Night! Many thanks to Sky, Cierra, and Artensia, and Big Friends Keith and Shankar for supporting this event.
Home Sweet Home is actively enrolling for the 2011-2012 School Year. The first day of school is August 29, 2011. Home Sweet Home anticipates a 3% - 5% increase on current tuition rates to inform next year's rates. Please note this will reflect the first tuition increase in two years.
Currently enrolled Home Sweet Home children and their siblings have priority placement. To ensure each family's ideal schedule, parents are asked to complete the contract sent directly to you by email and return it in Kathleen Seabolt's basket by April 15, 2011. Please attach the deposit required (if any), check made out to "Alternatives in Action" memo line: child's name, deposit. Please feel free to follow up with any questions.
For currently enrolled families graduating from Brown Bears in August 2011, there is an assumption this is your child's last month at Home Sweet Home, and your deposit will be applied for August payment. For families that choose to terminate their contract, please know that two months written notice must be received to facilitate application of the deposit toward final tuition.
Many thanks to all our Home Sweet Home families, current and almunae, who have referred their friends to our preschool!
Currently we anticipate that there are five full time Butterfly spots and five full time Brown Bear spots available for new families. Additionally there are three-five part time spots available in each class. There is no space available on Thursdays in Brown Bears for new families wishing to enroll in Brown Bears part time.
Thank you for keeping our program filled with wonderful children and families!
Monday, February 28, 2011
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
PAC Fundraising Updates
The PAC Fundraising Committee created a document based on parent and teacher surveys of needed and desired enhancements to the Home Sweet Home community. This is the report on Home Sweet Home current achievements from November 2010 to date.
Acquired through parent donation:
laptop computer
printer
Built:
shade area ($560.00 - PAC fundraising)
Purchased within HSH budget:
magnatiles (starter set)
digital camera
field trip (and subsidized by parent paid fee)
Kevin Carr, Irish Music (special rate due to parent connection)
It is important to note that while money is a necessary tool to acquiring the items and services desired, it is not an end in itself. Any wish-listed item that can be donated, gifted or grant purchased is a tremendous support to achieving our goals of program enhancement. Home Sweet Home also seeks fundraising opportunities that support program values and enhance community. The PAC Fundraising Committee has been very intentional about choosing activities that reflect our program values.
Home Sweet Home continues to raise money toward our goal of $6,000. The total amount raised to date through direct contribution (including the AIA Annual Fund) is $1377. This does not include contributions made toward the Teacher Appreciation Gifts. Laptop Lunch Fundraiser = $60.00 raised.
Families who have met or exceeded their volunteer hours for the year exceeds 65% in this first six months of program year! The goal of Home Sweet Home is to have 100% of families having met their volunteer hours requirement by June 1st.
Next steps:
From shade structure to Music Garden
Working with our Build Committee and Garden Committee to complete our vision of a vine covered trellis with many chimes. Watch this blog in March for an important Home to School Connection assignment from the Music Committee.
Sunday, March 13th - Sweet Moments
A community building event coordinated by HSH parents for HSH parents that will also raise money toward Home Sweet Home. Goal is 50 attendees and $1500.
April Build
Garden expansion focused, Home Sweet Home is currently pursuing three grants to support these efforts. The "build" will be the sod box and additional planters.
Please watch the Parent Board thermometer or this blog for continued updates!
Acquired through parent donation:
laptop computer
printer
Built:
shade area ($560.00 - PAC fundraising)
Purchased within HSH budget:
magnatiles (starter set)
digital camera
field trip (and subsidized by parent paid fee)
Kevin Carr, Irish Music (special rate due to parent connection)
It is important to note that while money is a necessary tool to acquiring the items and services desired, it is not an end in itself. Any wish-listed item that can be donated, gifted or grant purchased is a tremendous support to achieving our goals of program enhancement. Home Sweet Home also seeks fundraising opportunities that support program values and enhance community. The PAC Fundraising Committee has been very intentional about choosing activities that reflect our program values.
Home Sweet Home continues to raise money toward our goal of $6,000. The total amount raised to date through direct contribution (including the AIA Annual Fund) is $1377. This does not include contributions made toward the Teacher Appreciation Gifts. Laptop Lunch Fundraiser = $60.00 raised.
Families who have met or exceeded their volunteer hours for the year exceeds 65% in this first six months of program year! The goal of Home Sweet Home is to have 100% of families having met their volunteer hours requirement by June 1st.
Next steps:
From shade structure to Music Garden
Working with our Build Committee and Garden Committee to complete our vision of a vine covered trellis with many chimes. Watch this blog in March for an important Home to School Connection assignment from the Music Committee.
Sunday, March 13th - Sweet Moments
A community building event coordinated by HSH parents for HSH parents that will also raise money toward Home Sweet Home. Goal is 50 attendees and $1500.
April Build
Garden expansion focused, Home Sweet Home is currently pursuing three grants to support these efforts. The "build" will be the sod box and additional planters.
Please watch the Parent Board thermometer or this blog for continued updates!
Friday, February 11, 2011
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Thinking About Thinking About Math
Home Sweet Home is a humming hive of math activity in any given corner, whether teacher lead (snack fractions, Blokus game) or centers (sorting bears, dividing magnatiles, building with blocks, folding paper) or outside play (how many scoops of sand fill this bucket).
What children think about amounts, proportion and ratio, and how they compare and classify objects is of interest to the Early Childhood Educator. What is mathematical learning? How can adults support an open ended learning environment for math inquiry?
There is a lot of adult anxiety over academic preparation of children. This is understandable in an era of high stakes testing. How can adults ensure that math learning is developmentally appropriate? Young children may recite rote labels for symbols without comprehension of what numbers these symbols may represent, and this standard and other narrow objectives of canned curriculum can distract teachers from appreciating how mathematical thinking is authentically represented in young children's play. What do we know about how children construct this knowledge, and what can we do to enhance and support it without imposing a 3rd grade agenda on kindergarten?
"If our brains can represent numbers only approximately, then how were we able to "invent" numbers in the first place? The 'exact number sense' is a uniquely human property that probably stems from our ability to represent number very precisely with symbols. This reinforces the point that numbers are a cultural artifact, a man-made-construct rather than something we acquire innately." (Andreas Nieder)
Young children naturally map out numbers logarithmically. Numeric competency is achieved through instruction by adults and changes children's perception to a linear approach. Is it wise for preschool to advance this linear instruction? It is important and necessary to ponder this question, especially when this impacts children before the age of six years.
As adults, specifically adults in a developed, Western country, we live and work with both a linear and logarithmic understanding of quantity. The linear seems evident, but the logarithmic is also apparent, for example in the way we perceive one hundred as much more than three in the number of gallons of oil spilled on a beach, but one million does not feel like much less than one billion gallons of oil cleaned up out of a bay - the higher the numbers are, the closer together they may be perceived. This may also be illustrated in that many people clump millionaires and billionaires in the same elite circle, although one is one thousand times richer than the other. Many indigenous cultures maintain reliance on logarithmic perceptions for survival. This aides strategies for safety, health and defense. For example, tribes considered illiterate can judge at a glance, within grains, the cups of rice to be cooked, without measurement.
Could it be that we have suppressed our logarithmic intuition in our dependence on linearity? What are the consequences of this linear way of being?
Parents are invited to engage in discussions on math education within our Home Sweet Home community. We are blessed with the talent and expertise of many parents who are elementary and high school educators that can further our conversation.
What children think about amounts, proportion and ratio, and how they compare and classify objects is of interest to the Early Childhood Educator. What is mathematical learning? How can adults support an open ended learning environment for math inquiry?
There is a lot of adult anxiety over academic preparation of children. This is understandable in an era of high stakes testing. How can adults ensure that math learning is developmentally appropriate? Young children may recite rote labels for symbols without comprehension of what numbers these symbols may represent, and this standard and other narrow objectives of canned curriculum can distract teachers from appreciating how mathematical thinking is authentically represented in young children's play. What do we know about how children construct this knowledge, and what can we do to enhance and support it without imposing a 3rd grade agenda on kindergarten?
"If our brains can represent numbers only approximately, then how were we able to "invent" numbers in the first place? The 'exact number sense' is a uniquely human property that probably stems from our ability to represent number very precisely with symbols. This reinforces the point that numbers are a cultural artifact, a man-made-construct rather than something we acquire innately." (Andreas Nieder)
Young children naturally map out numbers logarithmically. Numeric competency is achieved through instruction by adults and changes children's perception to a linear approach. Is it wise for preschool to advance this linear instruction? It is important and necessary to ponder this question, especially when this impacts children before the age of six years.
As adults, specifically adults in a developed, Western country, we live and work with both a linear and logarithmic understanding of quantity. The linear seems evident, but the logarithmic is also apparent, for example in the way we perceive one hundred as much more than three in the number of gallons of oil spilled on a beach, but one million does not feel like much less than one billion gallons of oil cleaned up out of a bay - the higher the numbers are, the closer together they may be perceived. This may also be illustrated in that many people clump millionaires and billionaires in the same elite circle, although one is one thousand times richer than the other. Many indigenous cultures maintain reliance on logarithmic perceptions for survival. This aides strategies for safety, health and defense. For example, tribes considered illiterate can judge at a glance, within grains, the cups of rice to be cooked, without measurement.
Could it be that we have suppressed our logarithmic intuition in our dependence on linearity? What are the consequences of this linear way of being?
Parents are invited to engage in discussions on math education within our Home Sweet Home community. We are blessed with the talent and expertise of many parents who are elementary and high school educators that can further our conversation.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
The Fiddler in the Subway
"The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother's heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too."
The Fiddler in the Subway by pulitzer prize winning journalist Gene Weingarten explores the idea of would we recognize genius out of context. His essay reports on a real experiment facilitated in Washington DC when Joshua Bell performed the Charconne from Bach's Partita No.2 in D Minor outside of a subway for 45 minutes disguised in old clothes. He made $37. If a great musician plays great music and nobody hears. . .was he really any good? What is beauty? Is it a fact? Is it an opinion? Is it a little of each, but informed by the state of mind of the observer? Weingarten observed: "Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away."
This passage especially impacted me:
"One biologically intriguing fact about Bell is that he got his first music lessons when he was a four year old in Bloomington Indiana. His parents, both psychologists, decided formal training might be a good idea after they saw that their son had strung rubber bands across his dresser drawers and was replicating classical tunes by ear, plucking the strings and moving the drawers out to vary the pitch>" My reflection piece as a parent and an educator is do I give children the time, space and loose parts necessary to experiment on this level? Not that I need my child to be the best musician in the world (although that would be cool), but do they have opportunity to discover their unique genius independent of my understanding, or even my adult agenda?
It is interesting to consider how the current vogue and pervasive use of gadgets (ipods, phones, etc.) impacts our ability to connect in real time and intentionally with the world around us. How does the constant barrage of stimulation actually cocoon us from broadening experiences?
One of the intentional teaching strategies at Home Sweet Home is conscious listening. Taking time outside of and within routine and schedule to actively hear. What might this skill mastered in Early Childhood support for young learners developing competencies? What might these strategies look like and how can we further enhance this? Adults turning off visual and audio distractions and laying next to a child, eyes open or closed, and simply being for 15 minutes. What emerges when we are quiet with our thoughts and open to the environment?
The Fiddler in the Subway by pulitzer prize winning journalist Gene Weingarten explores the idea of would we recognize genius out of context. His essay reports on a real experiment facilitated in Washington DC when Joshua Bell performed the Charconne from Bach's Partita No.2 in D Minor outside of a subway for 45 minutes disguised in old clothes. He made $37. If a great musician plays great music and nobody hears. . .was he really any good? What is beauty? Is it a fact? Is it an opinion? Is it a little of each, but informed by the state of mind of the observer? Weingarten observed: "Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away."
This passage especially impacted me:
"One biologically intriguing fact about Bell is that he got his first music lessons when he was a four year old in Bloomington Indiana. His parents, both psychologists, decided formal training might be a good idea after they saw that their son had strung rubber bands across his dresser drawers and was replicating classical tunes by ear, plucking the strings and moving the drawers out to vary the pitch>" My reflection piece as a parent and an educator is do I give children the time, space and loose parts necessary to experiment on this level? Not that I need my child to be the best musician in the world (although that would be cool), but do they have opportunity to discover their unique genius independent of my understanding, or even my adult agenda?
It is interesting to consider how the current vogue and pervasive use of gadgets (ipods, phones, etc.) impacts our ability to connect in real time and intentionally with the world around us. How does the constant barrage of stimulation actually cocoon us from broadening experiences?
One of the intentional teaching strategies at Home Sweet Home is conscious listening. Taking time outside of and within routine and schedule to actively hear. What might this skill mastered in Early Childhood support for young learners developing competencies? What might these strategies look like and how can we further enhance this? Adults turning off visual and audio distractions and laying next to a child, eyes open or closed, and simply being for 15 minutes. What emerges when we are quiet with our thoughts and open to the environment?
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