You will not see this at our child care center
Pretty funny!
Robot Daycare
I hope your parent teacher conference last week went a little better than this one.
Unplanned Curriculum
The children found a praying mantis in the school’s garden. Although the children enjoyed keeping the praying mantis in the classroom for a little while so that they could observe it and also feed it real bugs, an important part of our science curriculum includes teaching children that insects need to thrive in their natural habitat. Here are some pictures of the children releasing the praying mantis.
Parent Workshop and Administrator training
As part of our communication with parents we will be scheduling semi-regular parent workshops. These workshops are voluntary and are no charge to enrolled parents. Our first one was last week and was titled: Guidance- “Speaking Children’s Language for Successful Lifelong Discipline.” They will be interactive workshops with opportunities for active discussion, debunking myths, and a time for questions and answers. The workshops will be lead by our owner Cristiane Foster who just last year received her Master degree in Education with an emphasis in Early Childhood.
Last week Jessica (Director at Children’s Village Preschool), Stephanie (Director at Edewater Preschool) and Cristiane (Administrator/Owner) attended an Administrator training seminar.
Parent Workshop – Guidance – Oct. 20th
“Speaking Children’s Language for Successful Lifelong Discipline.”
Please join us for the first of our parent workshop series!!! This workshop will be focused on guidance.
When: Thursday, October 20th between 5pm-6:30pm.
Who is invited?: All Edgewater parents!
What is it? This will be an interactive guidance workshop with opportunities for active discussion, debunking myths, and a time for questions and answers.
Where will it be? Edgewater Preschool Classroom
How much does it cost? Free of charge for all enrolled parents!
We need a head count for this event because space is limited, so please RSVP by Wednesday Oct. 19th either by email, phone, or in person.
Childcare is not provided during this workshop (although we will have regularly enrolled children in care until 6pm).
We hope to see you there!
Edgewater Preschool Pumpkin Patch Field Trip
During our Field Trip to the pumpkin patch, the children enjoyed a train ride through beautiful Irvine Regional Park, climbed aboard a hay wagon ride, navigated a giant hay maze, and then had an opportunity to pick their own pumpkin!!
More photos on our Facebook page
Edgewater Preschool Fall Festival
We hope everyone had a great time. From the alumni that stopped by to the face painter, the baloon guy, the ie cream treats, the pumkin decorating and the limbo, all were great! Here are a few pictures with many more on our Facebook page.
10 year anniversary at Edgewater Preschool Oct. 7th
Alan and Cristiane Foster along with the wonderful staff would like to invite all curent families and all alumni of Edgewater Preschool to help us celebrate 10 years as owners of Edgewater Preschool. Please help spread the word if you have old friends that attended Edgewater. We have e-mails back to about 2005 and mailing addresses in our computer database back to 2002. It is hard to imagine but in 2001 we did it all by hand and no longer have these addresses! I am sure many people have moved or updated e-mails so please help spread the word. We could potentially have a child from 2001 who is now in high school!
Friday October 7th, 2011 from 4:00 – 6:00pm
(Please no costumes)
There will be:
Family Pumpkin Decorating: Bring a pumpkin to decorate.
Ice Cream Sundae Station!!
Fresh Popcorn!!
Face painting!!
PanJive Steel Drum live entertainment!!
Please RSVP by phone or email before Friday September 30th
We hope to see you there!
Pictures are from January 2002. No bike path, no blue padding, no wood chips, no fencing……
That slide looks safe for a 2yr old! One of the first things we removed.
That cute girl painting in the Pixies room is our daughter who is now in middle school!
Preschool children learning with animals
At Edgewater Preshool we have chickens, a snake, a turtle, fish, walking sticks and rabbits that are all incorporated into the curriculum.
Art and Sensory Play at Edgewater Preschool
During our creative art/sensory week, the Edgewater Preschool children enjoyed painting on art easels and large boxes, working together on a mural, exploring with shaving cream, and even cooking their own play dough!!
More pictures on our Facebook page
Preschool: The Best Job-Training Program
This article was e-mailed to us today. We agree 100%!
Full article by by Alex Blumberg CLICK HERE. The article has references and study results (or I cut and pasted text below)
When economist James Heckman was studying the effects of job training programs on unskilled young workers, he found a mystery.
He was comparing a group of workers that had gone through a job training program with a group that hadn’t. And he found that, at best, the training program did nothing to help the workers get better jobs. In some cases, the training program even made the workers worse off.
The problem was that the students in the training program couldn’t learn what they were being taught. They lacked an important set of skills which would enable them to learn new things. Heckman, a Nobel-Prize-winning economist, calls these soft skills.
You might not think of soft skills as skills at all. They involve things like being able to pay attention and focus, being curious and open to new experiences, and being able to control your temper and not get frustrated.
All these soft skills are very important in getting a job. And Heckman discovered that you don’t get them in high school, or in middle school, or even in elementary school. You get them in preschool.
And that, according to Heckman, makes preschool one of the most effective job-training programs out there.
As evidence, he points to the Perry Preschool Project, an experiment done in the early 1960s in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Researchers took a bunch of 3- and 4-year-old kids from poor families and randomly assigned them to one of two groups. The kids in one group just lived their regular lives. And the kids in the other group went to preschool for two hours a day, five days a week.
After preschool, both groups went into the same regular Ypsilanti public school system and grew up side by side into adulthood.
Yet when researchers followed up with the kids as adults, they found huge differences. At age 27, the boys who had – almost two decades earlier – gone to preschool were now half as likely to be arrested and earned 50 percent more in salary that those who didn’t.
And that wasn’t all. At 27, girls who went to preschool were 50 percent more likely to have a savings account and 20 percent more likely to have a car. In general, the preschool kids got sick less often, were unemployed less often, and went to jail less often. Since then, many other studies have reported similar findings.
These results made me think: What is going on in preschool?
So I visited the Co-Op School, a preschool in Brooklyn. Eliza Cutler, a teacher there, said the kids do a lot of the same things the Perry Preschool kids did back in the 60s: They play, they paint, they build with blocks, and they nap.
If you didn’t know where to look, you wouldn’t see the job skills they’re learning.
Yet they are learning valuable skills: how to resolve conflicts, how to share, how to negotiate, how to talk things out. These are skills that they need to make it through a day of preschool now. And they are skills they will need to make it through a day of work when they’re 30.
If they learn these skills now, they’ll have them for the rest of their lives. But research shows that if they don’t learn them now, it becomes harder and harder as they get older. By the time the time they’re in a job training program in their twenties, it’s often too late.
Heckman is an economist so he thinks about this as a cost-benefit analysis. To him, the message is clear: If you want 21 year-olds to have jobs, the best time to train them is in the first few years of life.
Edgewater Preschool