Our first month together has flown by and there are so many highlights to share. The one thing that stands out to me is how quickly our little group has become a team. We have children who have never met before, some who do not speak the same language, some who are coming to a program for the very first time, all who have different personalities and different interests. We were all pleasantly surprised to see how easily many of the children adapted to coming to a new place each day with new teachers and peers.
Of course, separation from parents is tricky, but we got through that quickly and now we have happy children every day and only the occasional sad face at goodbye time.
As a new group, we focused on getting to know each other. Learning each other’s names through our Hickelty, Pickelty Bumble Bee song every morning (ask your children to sing this for you, they know it well by now). Through the activities we have set up each day and the opportunities to explore, we have seen their personalities bloom, and we are seeing how individual they all are.
Once we met the children and learned more about them, we were able to readjust our daily routines and activities to suit the group of children better.
We quickly realized that they ALL love to be outside, rain or shine. We started to go on morning walks and this has been a great active break that the children love. We run through the field, look at the trees, leaves, bugs, bunnies and squirrels. We play hide and seek in the trees, and they can’t seem to get enough of being “trapped” in the fence.
We have also learned their eating habits, their favourite songs to dance to (Floor is lava and animal freeze dance), as well as who likes messy sensory activities versus playing in the play kitchen or with puzzles.
We are very grateful that our program was able to open this September and couldn’t be more pleased with our small group of children. We look forward to learning more about them and from them in the coming months.