Wedneday’s turkey

This is the closest I could get to finding a red, white and blue turkey for Veteran’s Day!

Turkey hand print by Autumn, Day Nursery Northwest Center

Veteran’s Day Salute

Federal Center 2003

It is Veteran’s Day so 3 of our 7 Day Nursery centers are closed to observe the holiday.  Our State Government Center, Federal Center and Ft. Harrison Center are closed today.  This picture is an oldie but a goodie but I thought it would be good to share on with you today.

Tuesday turkey

Today's turkey by Caleb of Day Nursery Northwest reinforces the "less is more" school of thought.

Today’s blog post is brought to you by the number 40

Even though I was 12 when Sesame Street was born, I was a huge fan from day one.  Growing up in a house of six children our TV was often tuned to the PBS station for Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street.  I couldn’t let this milestone anniversary go by without saluting the people behind Sesame Street and thanking them for teaching me that there is no age limit on creativity.  Here’s my vote for Put Down the Duckie as the best Sesame Street song of all time. YouTube is featuring a lot of great links to Sesame Street songs and skits today and the baby boomers at Google are celebrating too. Today, all trips down Memory Lane will lead you to 123 Sesame Street.

Monday’s Turkeys

So many cute turkeys, so little time.  Today I am going to give you double the turkeys and double the fun so we can get them all in before Thanksgiving.

Handprint turkey by Ashton, Day Nursery Northwest Center

Handprint turkey by Dallas, Day Nursery Northwest Center

Egg cartons support learning

If you hate to throw away eggs cartons but don’t know what to do with the stack you have stashed in your closet, here are a few ideas to support your young child’s learning courtesy of NAEYC’s Teaching Young Children magazine .

Blocks: Close and tape shut many cartons. Voila! You have a set of giant blocks.

Sorting containers: Provide lots of objects to sort by color, shape, size or texture.  Children can put like objects in each cup.  Offer tweezers to build small muscles and coordination.  Make sure objects cannot be swallowed.

Lost and Found center: Provide cartons without lids to collect stray pieces from games or puzzles.  If something is missing from a game or puzzle, children can look for it in the lost and found carton.

Measuring Tool: Cut a carton in half lengthwise to make two rows of six cups.  Have your child tape rows end to end to make a long row of 12 cups.  Use it to measure areas in your house and outdoors.

Sunday’s turkey of the day

Handprint turkey by Day Nursery Northwest student Amaya

Today’s turkey

Hand print turkey by Alanni, Day Nursery Northwest student

Benny’s Pennies help teach Day Nursery students to Live United

As you may know, Day Nursery has been educating the youngest children of Indianapolis for over 110 years.  We not only teach children what they need to be prepared for the academic side of school, we work hard to equip the children with the social and emotional skills they will need to be successful in life. One of the ways young children learn is through role-playing.  For the past few weeks, Day Nursery employees have been setting a good example for our children by using our in-house United Way campaign to share an important lesson about giving. To further expand this lesson into the curriculum, Beth Rodriguez, our Director of Development and the mother of a Day Nursery student, discovered a picture book called Benny’s Pennies, written by Pat Brisson with illustrations by Bob Barner which became the springboard for a series of lessons about thoughtfulness, generosity and the power of giving. Each Day Nursery classroom was given a copy of the book and was free to expand the lesson to follow the children’s interests.  Sarah Parks, Director of the Day Nursery Federal Center sent me some pictures of the Benny’s Pennies activities from her preschool classrooms.  In the Pre-K classroom, the children were inspired by Benny’s generosity in the story and wanted to collect some pennies of their own.  Their teacher, Ms. Shirley brought in a glass jar and the students contributed their coins.  The children told their teacher they wanted to give the money in their jar to United Way to “buy something beautiful for children.”  Benny’s Pennies gave the preschool teachers a great chance to use life lessons to teach counting and number sense and social studies skills.  We are proud to report that 99% of our employees participated in United Way campaign this year resulting a group contribution of $16,423 plus a whole bunch of pennies.

The PreK classroom sorted their money into stacks to help the counting process.

The preschool three-year-olds class helps count pennies.

The march of the turkeys

The turkeys have arrived!  We are now in custody of a pile of fine-feathered, glittery, google-eyed turkeys.  Yesterday Beth and I spread them out over the table and invited the Day Nursery and Child Care Answers staff to vote for their top three choices.  We are not ready to unveil which turkey has been chosen as the “official” turkey for the Day Nursery Thanksgiving card quite yet, but since we had so many entries, I thought it might be nice to unveil a “Turkey of the Day” to showcase the talents of the preschool and kindergarten classes of Day Nursery Northwest.  Here’s today’s entry:

 

Handprint turkey by Airreon, Day Nursery Northwest student