The Wintonbury Peeper
Wintonbury Early Childhood Magnet School
In This Issue
Important Dates
Principal's Message
PTO
Health Office
Hispanic Heritage Celebrations
Handwriting Without Tears
Mat Man
Loose Parts
What Did You Do in School Today?
Important Information:
Please schedule your child’s flu shot as soon as possible this fall. By state law, all preschool students who are enrolled in schools are mandated by the state to have the flu shot annually by December 31st. All preschoolers must get a seasonal flu shot between 8/1/23 and 12/31/23. Documentation must be received by the school nurse verifying that your child received their flu shot. If the nurse’s office does not receive your documentation by December 31st, your child will not be allowed back at school until it is received. For students who have never received a flu shot, the Center of Disease Control and State of CT requires two doses of the flu vaccine at least 28 days apart. [Sec. 10-204a-2a. Adequate Immunization (k)]
Handwriting without Tears
The Handwriting Without Tears® program incorporates hands-on activities and multi-sensory teaching strategies that build good handwriting habits early. This program engages students with music, movement, fine motor activities, and child friendly language.
Key features of the program include:
1. Multi-Sensory Approach: HWT employs a multi-sensory approach, engaging children through various senses such as touch and movement. This approach helps them build a strong foundation for writing by integrating visual, auditory, and tactile learning experiences.
2. Developmentally Appropriate: The program is designed to be developmentally appropriate, recognizing and respecting the individual learning styles and abilities of each child. It takes into account the stages of a child's motor skill development, ensuring a gradual and successful progression in writing skills.
3. Proven Effectiveness: Handwriting Without Tears is backed by extensive research and has demonstrated its effectiveness in enhancing handwriting skills among preschoolers. The program has been widely adopted and praised by educators, parents, and professionals in the field of early childhood education.
One component of this curriculum is child friendly, simple language. Few, carefully selected words, that are easy for young children to know and understand, are used to teach letter formation.
Children learn size, shape, positional concepts through teacher directed pay, using wood pieces: big line, little line, big curve, little curve. For example, they make the letter B with a Big Line + Little Curve + Little Curve. Wooden pieces, slate chalkboards, play dough templates, and stamps, are a few of the materials that provide children with the opportunity to make large letters, and internalize the movements, before transferring the skill to paper.
Follow this link to learn the formation language for each capital letter.
What Did You Do in School Today?
Tired of hearing "Nothing". Speech pathologist Nikki Hyman gives concrete tips for parents to get children to share information about their day.
The biggest mistake parents make is to ask questions that can be answered with one word, like “How was your day?” or “What did you do today?” They typically answer “fine” or “nothing”.
Your child’s day has been extremely busy with lots of new and different activities. They are often drained and need time to ‘chill.’ Once you have asked how the day was, (and as long as the answer was some sort of affirmation), wait at least half an hour before you try and get any more information out of them. Think about how you feel after a long day at work.
1. Find out about their school timetable
This allows you to ask specific questions about, art, music, library, assembly or outside play.
2. Ask open-ended questions
-These are questions that can’t be answered with yes/no.
-For example: What story did your teacher read you today? What was it about?
-What toys did you play with?
-Did you sing any songs? (if you know they had music/singing).
-Tell me about your picture that you drew/something you wrote.
-Did anything funny happen?”
3. Get information about the theme they are using
Find out if the class is using a theme for the week or the term. Explore the topic together at home and talk about the vocabulary around the theme. This will give your child the confidence to talk about it at school.
4. Model sharing about your own day
It doesn’t have to be entirely true because sharing with your child that you took them to school and went to work is not very interesting to them. Talk about something with enthusiasm. So you might say something like “I had a busy day today. I took you to school and then I went to the shops to buy some delicious snacks for you to take to school in your lunch.” This is likely to open the conversation gate to “what did you buy?”
5. Stretch conversation with “invitation openers”
If and when your child shares a detail use comments like: “Really?” “Uh huh?” “I don’t believe it!” “Wow!” They’re not threatening and invite a talker to open up.
6. Repeat talk portions
Try repeating bits of your child’s conversation:
Child: “I played on the swing.”
You: “You played on the swing?”
The trick is to repeat the information in a matter-of-fact but interested way to get your child to open up and add more information.
You can also make "mistakes" which may encourage her to correct you and then expand. Instead of answering “you played on the swing”, you could answer “you played in the snow?”
7. Talk while doing
Some kids (especially boys) are more likely to open up while doing something they enjoy, like eating ice cream, drawing, or building Lego. In saying this, it is also important to avoid asking challenging questions during transitions. It’s far more difficult to talk during transitions or while multitasking (e.g. walking out of the school into the parking lot, getting in and out of the car, preparing lunch). Instead, keep your questions thoughtful and simple during transitions. Save the more challenging questions for when you are home and settled. For example, you might greet you child with “I’m so happy to see you! I can’t wait to hear all about your day.”
8. Use mealtimes to talk
Knowing that the family gathered at dinner is a safe place to share joys and disappointments, is comforting. If parents start modeling communication then children will learn that this is a place to talk about their day.
9. Listen, listen, listen
Once your child starts talking about his day, stop asking questions and listen. As parents, we tend to jump in with more questions, but pausing is important as it gives your child the chance to gather and organize his thoughts and ideas.
10. Sometimes Fine is Fine
Don’t expect your child to want to talk about school every day. Be more realistic and let them have days when they don’t have to tell you anything. Remember, you can find out about how your child is doing by talking to other parents and the teacher. You may also find that if your child has a friend home to play after school, they tell you an awful lot more than when they are alone with you.
Saturday, November 1
