Dirt Isn't Dirty!

“Don’t touch that, it’s dirty!”

“Wash your hands before you eat!”

“You’re getting mud all over the place!”

How often do we hear and use these phrases with our children? In the last decade or two, D-I-R-T has become a four-letter word in the eyes of a vast majority of parents. The fact is that dirt, it seems, is not so dirty. Actually, it’s incredibly beneficial to your child’s growth and development, both physically and mentally.

We have already talked about how getting outside is important in getting young children to stay active, helping to avoid major health issues such as childhood obesity, diabetes, and vitamin D deficiency. It turns out that dirt takes this one step further. Being exposed to the different bacteria and other microorganisms found in dirt helps build your child’s immune system. Certain bacteria can even stimulate the production of serotonin in our brains (an affect similar to that of exercising or taking anti-depressant medication), keeping our children naturally happier.

Here at the Friedberg JCC Early Childhood Centers, we are doing our best every day to make sure our children experience the joy of dirt! Even last week’s lingering April showers couldn’t dampen the spirits of our preschoolers, and everyone found themselves enjoying being outside and getting a little dirty.

Over in Long Beach our two’s took nature walks and noticed that they saw more insects on the grey days that were a little cooler, rather than when the sun was out. Our three’s also spent time outdoors as they began preparing our nursery school garden for plants. They dug in the dirt, and even made a mud pie. Yum!

Our Long Beach Pre-K kids got an extra special treat this week when the Truck Farm visited from Brooklyn! Ian and James told us all about the garden they grow in the back of their flatbed truck, and (thanks to plexiglass sides) showed us not only the plants they grow, but their roots and layers of soil as well! We asked a lot of questions about planting and gardening, but most importantly learned that you can grow plants practically anywhere (even in your Daddy’s hat)!

Long Beach Pre-K loved the Truck Farm!

Friday in Merrick/Bellmore was Special Person’s Day. We were all so excited to share our love of the outdoors with some very important people! We began the day by making a fun art extension project together with our special people. Next, everyone made their way outside to our playground to do some planting! We have new planter boxes outside, and had lots of fun taking turns digging up the dirt to put in flowers. We can’t wait to watch the bloom and bring so much natural beauty to our playground!

Planting with a "Special Person" in Merrick/Bellmore

Meanwhile, in Oceanside the children were spending so much wonderful time outdoors. Our Pre-K classes set butterflies free after watching their metamorphosis from caterpillars. It was so exciting to see them fly off into the sky!

Miss Caryn’s class decided it would be a ton of fun to express themselves artistically outside of our building. We all hit the pavement with lots of colored chalk and had a ball covering the sidewalk (and ourselves) with brightly colored chalk dust. Don’t worry,  soap and water rinsed it all away!  The Oceanside two’s also had a great time running, jumping, climbing and sliding all over our playground. No matter what the weather, we have fun outdoors!

We love sidewalk chalk in Oceanside!

Interested in learning more about the benefits of your child getting outdoors and getting dirty? We love this great report from the National Wildlife Federation!

Of course, don’t forget to check out our Pinterest  for more ideas of things to do in the great outdoors. And head over to our Facebook for tons of photos from this week’s fun!

Screen Free Week!

Last week, the Friedberg JCC Early Childhood Centers participated in a very special project: Screen Free Week!  The CCFC (Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood) encourages families every year to turn off as many screens as they can, for as long as they can for 7 days. In doing so, we learn to “turn on life” and practice healthy habits such as playing outdoors, reading, and spending quality time with family.

All of our children were very busy all week long learning and playing in many different ways; none of which involved a screen!

At our Merrick/Bellmore site, Spring is the big topic. Some of our classes have butterfly kits and are busy observing the daily changes in their caterpillars as they start to turn into butterflies! We are watching them eat and grow as they get ready for this exciting transformation!

Also at Merrick/Bellmore, we are learning about April Showers and May Flowers (although it seems lately that the showers have come in May as well)! Not only are we making umbrellas and beautiful flowers to decorate, but we are also learning about how flowers and plants need the rain in order to grow. 

Finally, each of our Merrick/Bellmore families were fully encouraged to participate in Screen Free Week by filling out a daily log of screen free activities. We found out that our families played dress up, went to the playground, drew pictures, and even baked their own pizzas! We are so proud of everyone for truly recognizing this great holiday.

In Oceanside, our children celebrated another holiday as well as Screen Free Week: Cinco de Mayo!!  While we could log onto the internet or watch something on TV to find out about Mexico’s heritage, we chose to lean about it in a more hands on way. We wore Mexican costumes and marched around with cool instruments like Maracas to showcase what we learned!

Happy Cinco de Mayo from Oceanside!

At our Long Beach branch, everyone is a flutter about butterflies! Just like our friends in Merrick/Bellmore, we are witnessing firsthand the incredible transformation process of a caterpillar into a butterfly. This week we were excited to see our caterpillars begin their chrysalis phase of metamorphosis. Everyone was so fascinated; it was hard not to touch them!

In keeping with Screen Free Week, everyone read books about butterflies to enhance our learning. Our two’s read Dawn Bentley’s “Goodnight Sweet Butterfly,” and the classes “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” by Eric Carle. They also made paper butterflies that we decorated with beautiful colored tissue paper. Our three’s took a slightly different approach and made their butterflies out of plastic bags filled with sequins and glitter! They then also read “The Butterfly Garden” by Sue Harris.

Last but not least, our Long Beach Pre-K enjoyed reading “Angelina and the Butterfly” by Katherine Holibird.  Afterward,, everyone was so excited to watch their teachers carefully transfer this week’s newly formed cocoons into their new butterfly pavilions! We are all hoping that the butterflies will emerge from their cocoons in time for this week’s trip to the Henry Kaufmann Campgrounds!

See how much fun and learning can happen when we turn our screens off? Even though Screen Free Week is over, we would like to encourage everyone to continue every day to spend as little time as possible in front of their television and computer screens.  If you’re ever looking for a great activity to fill in the time usually spent with video games or the internet, check out the Friedberg JCC Early Childhood on Pinterest! We promise to post great activities on a regular basis in order to help provide your family with the best ideas for learning, growing, and having fun together!

Want to see more great pictures of our week? Head to our Facebook page for some great smiling faces!

Happy Birthday Israel!

Wow!! What a wonderful week to be at the Friedberg JCC Early Childhood Centers. Yesterday, April 26^th we celebrated Yom Ha’atzmaut- Israeli Independence Day, and boy do we know how to throw a party!

In Oceanside all of our children donned special Israeli flag hats and signs as we marched around the whole building! We waved our Israeli flags high in the air so that all of the JCC members would know we were celebrating this very special birthday.

At the end of our special parade, we all gathered for a wonderful sing-a-long with Miss Diane and Miss Brooke. This was made extra special when Rabbi Greenspan from Oceanside Jewish Center joined us and taught us how to sing “Happy Birthday to Israel” in Hebrew!! We were all so proud of ourselves for learning to celebrate Israel in its national language.

We finished off this spectacular day by heading back to our classrooms for snack. But this wasn’t just any snack… we had blue and white birthday cupcakes that we baked ourselves for this very special occasion! Everyone had smiles (and frosting) all over their faces!!

Yummy Cupcakes in Oceanside!

Meanwhile over in Long Beach…

We kicked off our celebration with an outdoor parade around the block wearing hats that we made so the whole neighborhood could rejoice with us!! Earlier in the week, every classroom made their own flags to wave, which we all did in different ways.  Our Two’s used their flags to review the colors blue and white, while the Three’s broke down the different shapes on the flag and talked about rectangles and triangles. Finally, our Pre-K kids learned how to illustrate their own flags.  Drawing one triangle right-side-up and another one up-side-down can be quite difficult, and we were touched to see our children who grasped the concept the easiest helping their friends until they were all successful!

After our parade we came back to our classrooms and talked about why Israel is important to us. Some of our favorite responses included:

Two-year-olds: “Because it’s Israel’s birthday!”

Three-year-olds: “My Safta lives there!” and “They have lots of dreidels there!”

Pre-K: “It’s a really old country; it’s bigger than a city; it’s 64 years old” and “Because it’s close and very far away at the same time!”

Our Long Beach children also had the pleasure of working with Miss Yochi to learn the Israeli national anthem- Hatikvah. We’re so proud of them!! Check out this wonderful video of our Pre-K  kids singing:

As you can see, it was a spectacular week full of celebration!

Next week is really important to us too; it’s national Screen Free Week. We have been talking all month long about the importance of outdoor play and recently celebrated Earth Day, so it makes perfect sense that it all culminates in this celebration. You will hear all about Screen Free Week from us next Friday, but in the meantime check out http://www.commercialfreechildhood.org/screenfreeweek/ to prepare yourself and your family for the week ahead.

Check out our Facebook for more great pictures from this week’s celebrations!

Let's Play Outdoors!

Take a deep breath……..close your eyes……….. and think back to your  best childhood memories from the four seasons. If we had to guess, we would imagine they look something like this:

Jumping in piles of leaves and pumpkin picking in the Fall.

Building snowmen and going sledding in the Winter.

Digging for worms and wiggling your toes in the mud during Spring.

Running through sprinkler, climbing trees, digging in sand in the Summer.

Were we right?

Now try it again, only this time think about what you see children (yours and others) doing during each of those seasons. We don’t know about you, but we see less of outdoors and more video games, watching television, and sitting at a computer.

As the speed of our day-to-day lives starts to move faster and faster, so do the lives of our children.

Too often we see parents, who are exhausted and over extended, sitting their young ones down in front of a screen for hours on end. Even in Walt Disney World, a place designed for families to share experiences and create memories, parents were seen handing old iPods to fussy children in strollers rather than engaging them in their surroundings.

Outdoor play not only moves us away from this “screen epidemic”, it is also incredibly important to your child’s growth and development.

Outdoor play encourages physical activity!

According to First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign, “ nearly one in three children in America are overweight or obese”- a problem that may lead to heart disease, diabetes, or a number of other health risks. Outdoor, open spaces encourage running, jumping, climbing, and many more physical activities that are beneficial to adults and children alike!

Being outside promotes creativity!  

The moment they step outside, your children are surrounded with colors, shapes, and textures. What a perfect place to inspire a young artist or builder without the fear of ruining your new carpeting! Throw on some old jeans and a ratty t-shirt and get to work building with mud and drawing on sidewalks.  Draw on the sidewalk with chalk or water color paint!  We promise your children (and you) will love this form of self-expression!

The outdoors is incredibly stimulating!  

There is so much learning that can go on the moment you step outside.  Young children learn through their senses so, the simple act of smelling a flower, watching a butterfly flap its wings, or hearing the leaves rustle in the breeze help shape their minds as they begin to understand the world around them.

Here at the Friedberg JCC Early Childhood Centers we will be joining the rest of our nation to celebrate two very important “holidays” this month:

Earth Day on April 22^nd.  What better way to celebrate Earth Day than getting outside?  Join us at the Henry Kaufman campgrounds for an open house.  Meet former NY Yankee Ron Blomberg and enjoy some fun Earth Day craft projects. Check out our website for more information!

Screen Free Week from April 30^th-May 6^th.   Throughout the next three weeks, we will be encouraging every one of our families to move away from their screens and into the great outdoors! We’ll be posting our favorite ways to do this on our Facebook page starting Monday!

Looking for more information on the importance of getting outdoors? Check out this great article Take It Outside! from Early Childhood News!

Zissen Pesach Everyone!!

Looking at the pictures of the three centers’ Passover celebrations is a sight to behold!  It’s amazing how much learning took place while the children had a blast. 

Egyptians Marching At Oceanside!

What’s particularly interesting are all the ways that Passover is celebrated in our centers.  It’s reflective of the many ways  that we celebrate Passover in our homes.  Our children take the lessons they’ve learned in school and add another dimension (often extremely entertaining) to our Seder tables.

Singing Passover Songs At Merrick/Bellmore

At my own home, our favorite time at the Seder table were our boys singing “Frogs here” or “Bang, Bang, Bang,” with such feeling that you knew the moment created a lifetime of happy memories.

As we prepare for tonight, many of our children are helping decorate the tables with their own Kiddush cup, Seder Plate or Matzoh Cover they made at school.  These experiences are learning at it’s finest.   Interactive, hands on and fun.

Enjoying Yummy Matzah At Long Beach!

However you celebrate, from our homes to yours, we wish you a Zissen Pesach, and lifetime of memories.

Check out more great seder pictures here!

Festival Of The Spring!

Did you know that one of the names for Passover is האביב‎ חג  (Chag Ha-Aviv) – “Festival of the Spring”? Take a look at your Seder Plate.  See the Karpas (typically parsley)? One of the lesser-known meanings of Karpas is that it is a representation of Spring on our Passover table.  Here at the Friedberg JCC Early Childhood Centers we love this merging of two of our favorite times; Passover, the rebirth of the Jewish People and Spring, the rebirth of the Earth!  This week, as we prepare for our Passover celebrations, we are also learning all about Spring and the exciting things it brings with it!

Let’s begin with Passover…

As the Jewish people fled from Egypt, they had no time to let their bread rise, and so they strapped their dough to their backs and let it bake in the sun. We commemorate this every year by making and eating Matzah during the days of Passover. To learn about this, our Jewish Culture Specialist, Miss Yochi, continued to visit each of our three branches to make our very own Matzah Bakery! She didn’t just read a Hagadah though, she taught us about the story of Passover through song, dance and hands on activities. Check out this great video of our Long Beach branch singing “Avadim Hayinu” – “We Were Slaves” with Miss Yochi!

 

Merrick/Bellmore at the Matzah Bakery!

We’re also very busy preparing for our Seders next week. We are creating art extension projects to put on our tables, making chocolate covered Matzah, and rehearsing our roles for these exciting gatherings. Check back next week to read all about them and see more fantastic photos and videos!

And now onto Spring…

Our Long Beach branch continued to enhance our Author Studies with books about Springtime and exploring outdoors! Our Two-Year-Olds welcomed Spring with The Sparkly Garden by Caroline Davis, went on a nature walk and pointed out daffodils and crocuses growing in our neighborhood.  Our Pre-K also studied flowers by reading Spring Snowman by Jill Barne.  This is about a field of daisies that takes on the shape of a snowman! We also listened to Wake Up It’s Spring by Lisa Campbell Ernst which celebrates the awakening of life in the Springtime!

The Long Beach Three’s took a different approach and talked about how windy the month of March can be as Spring begins. We continued our author study of Chris L. DeMarest with his book, My Blue Boat by making our own boats with foam bottoms, twig masts, and paper sails. We held a sailboat race in our class sensory table and pretended to be the wind as we blew our boats from one end to the other!

Sail Boat Races in Long Beach! 

Over at our Merrick/Bellmore branch, Miss Helen’s Pre-K class learned all about the life cycle of a frog! We have our very own tadpole, Jacob, who we each keep track of every day by writing in our very own “My Frog Log” to observe his daily changes. When completed, our logs will have 5 pages about Jacob’s becoming a frog:

My Frog Log

1)   Mommy Frog drops eggs

2)   Tadpoles have long tails

3)   Tadpoles grow back legs

4)   Tadpoles grow front legs

5)   Now they are Frogs!

Check out our Facebook page next week for some great pictures of Jacob!

Springtime fun continued over in Oceanside! Our toddlers had so much fun welcoming in the new season with a great finger-painting art extension project. We chose colors that reminded us of Spring: pink for flowers, yellow for the sun, and green for the grass. We then had a wonderful time letting our imaginations run wild as we painted abstract pieces of art on paper (and our own bodies!) with bright Springtime colors!

Springtime Abstract Paintings in Oceanside! 

Spring is definitely in full bloom at the Friedberg JCC Early Childhood Center! We can’t wait to have so much fun out in the warm weather this season. Don’t forget to check in again next week when we tell you all about our Seders!

If you’re looking for more Springtime fun at home (and a way to clear out your chametz before Passover), check out this great idea for PB & J Blossom Sandwiches from Disney Family Fun! And check out our Facebook page for more wonderful photos! 

National Reading Month!

If you read our post on Dr. Seuss’s Birthday, you’ll remember that March is National Reading Month! Here at the Friedberg JCC Early Childhood Centers, we have been so busy filling our days with books from some of our favorite authors.  

Some of our classrooms have been spending time on Author Studies. For and author study, we pick an author we love or are want to learn more about  and then select a number of books.   We read, review and re-read the books and then participate in fun learning activities and art extension projects.

Over at our Merrick/Bellmore branch, some of our favorite authors were Don Freeman- Corduroy Lost and Found, Paulette Bourgeois and Brenda Clark- Franklin, Eric Carle- The Tiny Seed, and Gail Gibbons- The Planets. We had so much fun studying them! It was great learning about our solar system and making our own solar system pictures to go along with it. We also  learned how a seed becomes a plant!

One of the coolest art extension projects we did was to make our own Corduroy! We painted his brown body and overalls green with sponges of all different shapes and sizes. Afterwards, we made sure to place eyes on his face, and painted his buttons onto his overalls!

The Author Studies continued over at our Long Beach branch. Our Twos read Good Night Moon by Margaret Wise Brown and took part in shadow play that taught us about day and night. We also made some great caterpillar and feather art extension projects after reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle and Feathers for Lunch by Lois Ehlert.

Long Beach Threes also read great books by Margaret Wise Brown! First, we read Baby Animals and learned how different animals sleep with an acting activity. We also became bedroom architects after reading Brown’s Robin’s Room! After reading The Wind Blew and We’re Going On A Picnic by Pat Hutchins, we were so thankful for the beautiful weather as we took our lessons outside! We enjoyed our morning snack picnic style, and learned about the wind by making a parachute and kites!

Our Long Beach Pre-K program took inspiration this week and learned all about team building from David McPhail and his books The Great Race and Jack And Rick. First, we had a great deal of fun recognizing our individual abilities by participating in an animal relay race, and then learned about working together by running a three-legged race! Check out this great video of our animal races:

In Oceanside our reading focused on Passover preparation…

One of our favorite activities leading up to Passover is making Matzah.  Miss Yochi (Jewish Culture Specialist) visited the Nursery and Pre-K classes teaching them about Passover with stories and songs, and highlighting the experience by making homemade Matzah with the children. Miss Yochi took the learning a step further, when she and the children made their own fresh butter to put on their matzoh. What fun everyone had!!  We also read books and stories about Passover which led to a unit on Frogs. Miss Caryn's Pre-K has Frogs here there and everywhere!

This week definitely proved how much fun you can have learning through reading! We hope you are all reading at home with your families and friends. Want to dedicate yourself to learning through reading? Try taking the Reader’s Oath from the National Education Association (NEA). We love it!

Happy Reading Everyone!