December 2023: The Shining Light of Mine
“This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine!”
Mindful Focus: Unity, Individuality, and Connection
Explorations: Lights, Ways to Celebrate, Traditions, Families
SimpleLife is setting that recognizes how all people are unique individuals who can unite and connect through love and peace. We acknowledge that there are many types of families, celebrations, and traditions. December holds many holidays, and is an appropriate time to tell children that there are many other ways to celebrate within unique families. We simply encourage children to hold respect and kindness towards all people.
New songs we sang this month:
Light a Candle for Peace by Shelley Murley
This Little Light of Mine (Elizabeth Mitchell version)
Lights Exploration:
The light we see, and the light we feel.
There is something we all have in common, we celebrate life with light. Candles, light decorations, lanterns, fireworks, and more! It is so fun to include light into the play and learning we do continually. The children enjoyed decorating their train tracks with lights, making shadow puppets, making a lantern, and creating with the projector in the quiet cave.
We also encourage everyone to recognize another type of light, the light within us. This can be shared through kindness, compassion, empathy, respect, and so much more. It is what connects us and grows a sense of unity!
Celebrations & Traditions:
What do you and your family like to do together?
December, it is a busy month for parents and teachers! But bringing joy to our littles make it all worth it. Children love traditions. It gives them a sense of security and confidence in what is going to happen. Most of us have yearly traditions around a holiday, but we can also incorporate traditions in our day-to-day life. Family movie night, park days, taco night, etc. It can be as simple as a song that is played or sung at a certain time of day. Including children in the creation and preparation of traditions enhances their memory of the experience and makes them feel important and a part of something special.
We made decorations for our classroom, dancing ribbons, lanterns, and had families share their special traditions with us! Oh what fun!
Winter Celebration:
The excitement of enjoying an important occasion.
We intentionally set a tone of joyful special events. There’s so many reasons to celebrate! Through human connection we find happiness in bonding on certain days and creating fun activities! Although there wasn’t much snow this month, we celebrated the love and warmth winter brings. We baked and decorated gingerbread men cookies, danced and sang to live music, and packed gift bags; both to receive and to give.
It was such an exciting day for us to connect, spread love, share our individuality, and bring joy and peace.
Art:
Wet-on-Wet Watercolor, drawing our family, watercoloring pinch pots, light-on-dark, and paper collage.
Wet-on-wet watercolor is where we soak watercolor paper and then use droppers to spread liquid watercolor to create a colorful rainbow creation! Once it was dry children very mindfully drew a family portrait, each family different and wonderful!
We also used watercolor to color our pinch pots we made in November.
With black paper and white chalk, children noticed shapes and shading in still life objects to make a light-on-dark picture. This expands the child’s sense of the possibilities of art and the materials we can use.
Children displayed their much practiced cutting and glueing skills to make a paper collage to be displayed in their preschool portfolio.
Art has no limits and child’s creativity needs to be nurtured and appreciated as is.
