Day Nursery IU Health Center celebrates Blue Friday

The staff at the Day Nursery IU Health Early Care and Education Center used yesterday’s Blue Friday as an opportunity to reinforce skills that children need to be successful in elementary school.  Students in Ms. Lee Ann Kidwell‘s preschool classroom had an opportunity to make two items decorated in the team colors of the Indianapolis Colts.  Activities such as makign friendship bracelets and decorating pine cones help develop fine motor skills as well as teach children to follow directions, take turns and to follow and repeat patterns.

The building of fine motor skills in children will enable them to perform a variety of important functional tasks including tying shoes, zipping and unzipping, writing legibly and without significant muscle fatigue, playing games that require precise hand and finger control and drawing, painting, and coloring.

Thanks to Center Director Charity Jablonski for sharing these pictures.

Day Nursery IU Health

Day Nursery IU Health

Day Nursery IU Health

Day Nursery IU Health

Day Nursery IU Health

Day Nursery IU Health

 

Introducing Day Nursery’s 2010 Official Turkey

The students enjoyed the book Setting the Turkeys Free written by W. Nikola-Lisa and illustrated by Ken Wilson-Max so much that they made many hand print turkeys to decorate their classroom.

2010 marks the 5th year that Day Nursery has selected an “official” hand print turkey in celebration of Thanksgiving (see Talking Turkey for more history).  The official turkey is selected by a panel of staff members in our administrative offices.  We use the student artwork to decorate a Thanksgiving card sent to our donors and supporters. Beth Rodriguez, Day Nursery Director of Development oversees the judging.  This year she really captured the spirit of the competition in her emails to the staff announcing the contenders are “so cute you could gobble them up” and reminding everyone not to “stuff” the ballot box.    I will spare you the rest of the corny jokes as I am pleased to present the winning turkey for this year, created by 4-year-old Nathaniel of Ms. Lee Ann Kidwell’s preschool room at the Day Nursery Clarian Center.

Talking Turkey at Day Nursery

2009 Winner Lauren Dotsu of the Day Nursery Northwest Center

For the past five years, our Director of Development, Beth Rodriguez and I have collaborated with our teachers to send notes of thanks to our donors in the form of  hand print turkey art.  The first year we (very sincerely) believed that each donor had to receive an original piece of art.  In our enthusiasm for that idea, we didn’t think through how creative the preschoolers could be with feathers and glitter and we ended up with quite a few cards that were a bit too lumpy to mail.  Over the years we have refined the process a bit by scanning the artwork before making the card.  This works better for the post office and the child gets to keep their original artwork.  This year the preschoolers in Lee Ann Kidwell‘s class at the Day Nursery Clarian Center have been selected as our artistic team.  Here are a few shots of them making their creations.  Tomorrow I will start posting some of their turkey artwork and we will reveal which turkey was selected for the card later this week.