At the Academy, as part of our Conscious Discipline Curriculum, our toddlers participate in Baby Doll Circle Time. 

Here’s why baby doll circle time is important for preschoolers and toddlers, especially when grounded in the Conscious Discipline approach:

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🌱 1. Builds Emotional Connection and Empathy

In baby doll circle time, children care for a baby doll—feeding, rocking, soothing, and talking kindly.

• This helps them practice empathy and understand feelings (“My baby is sad—what can I do to help?”).

• By mirroring the nurturing behaviors modeled by the teacher, they learn how to express love, gentleness, and comfort with others.

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💬 2. Strengthens Language and Communication Skills

Through songs, rhymes, and talking to the dolls, children:

• Practice naming feelings and body parts (“Baby is sleepy,” “Baby’s eyes are closed”).

• Build vocabulary and use social language in caring, relational contexts.

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💗 3. Supports Attachment and Safety (Key to Conscious Discipline)

Conscious Discipline emphasizes that safety and connection come before learning.

• When children “care” for their doll, they experience being the nurturer, reinforcing a sense of security and self-regulation.

• The routine of circle time helps children feel safe and predictable, key to developing self-control.

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🧠 4. Teaches Self-Regulation and Problem-Solving

Children learn to manage emotions by modeling soothing actions (“Let’s take a deep breath to calm our baby”).

• This helps them practice calming strategies they can later use on themselves.

• Over time, they internalize those skills for their own emotional regulation.

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🤝 5. Encourages Social Skills and Community

Group circle time with dolls helps toddlers and preschoolers learn:

• Taking turns, watching others, and sharing space

• Practicing cooperation and kindness

• Feeling part of a caring classroom family, a key Conscious Discipline principle

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In short:

Baby doll circle time is not “just play.”
It’s a powerful way to help young children:

• Feel safe and connected

• Develop empathy and self-regulation

• Build language and social skills

• Experience the foundations of emotional intelligence

 

In preparation for kindergarten readiness, our PreK classrooms are working on shapes and fine motor skills, including cutting and gluing. Children benefit in many ways from these types of activities: 

🎯 Key Benefits of Combining Fine Motor + Shape/Math Skills in Preschool

1. Enhanced Brain Development

• Activities that involve both hands-on manipulation (e.g., cutting, tracing, building) and shape/math recognition (e.g., sorting shapes, matching patterns) activate multiple areas of the brain at once.

• This promotes neural connections between motor coordination, spatial reasoning, and early numeracy.

2. Improved School Readiness

• Fine motor skills (like holding a pencil or manipulating small objects) are essential for writing.

• Recognizing shapes and understanding spatial relationships lay the foundation for geometry, measurement, and number sense.

• Together, they prepare children for kindergarten tasks, such as drawing shapes, writing numbers, and solving puzzles.

3. Stronger Spatial Awareness

• Manipulating shapes builds visual-spatial skills: understanding how objects fit and relate in space.

• These are key for early math skills such as geometry, symmetry, patterns, and even understanding quantity and number lines.

4. Deeper Conceptual Learning Through Hands-On Activities

• Children internalize math concepts more deeply when using their hands.

  • E.g., Using playdough to make shapes = understanding sides/corners + developing hand strength.

  • Puzzles and tangrams = shape recognition + problem solving + hand-eye coordination.

5. Language and Vocabulary Growth

• As children handle shapes and tools, they’re more likely to use descriptive math vocabulary: circle, triangle, bigger, smaller, sides, corners, etc.

• Teachers can scaffold these moments into math talk, boosting both math literacy and language development.

6. Increased Engagement and Focus

• Motor activities that incorporate math are fun and interactive, keeping young learners focused longer.

• Hands-on shape games and manipulatives support active learning, which is more effective than passive listening at this age.

7. Supports Diverse Learning Styles

• Combines kinesthetic (movement), visual, and logical learning modes.

• Helps children with different strengths access math concepts in ways that suit their learning needs.

By integrating fine motor and shape/math skill development, preschool educators support whole-child growth. This approach not only builds strong foundations for math and writing but also enhances focus, language, and confidence in young learners—setting them up for long-term success.

 Our children have been busy exploring, creating, and learning through hands-on building activities using everyday objects like cardboard boxes, plastic containers, paper towel rolls, bottle caps, and more. You might be wondering—why are we using these ordinary items for learning?

The truth is, building with everyday objects plays a powerful role in your child’s development.

Here’s why it’s important:

1. Encourages Creativity and Imagination
When children build with open-ended materials, there are no instructions—just possibilities! This helps them think creatively, come up with their own ideas, and bring their imagination to life.

2. Builds Problem-Solving Skills
Figuring out how to balance, stack, or connect objects teaches children how to solve problems, try new strategies, and keep trying if something doesn’t work the first time.

3. Develops Fine Motor Skills
Handling small items, taping, gluing, and stacking help strengthen the small muscles in their hands and fingers—essential for writing and other daily tasks.

4. Supports Early Math and Science Thinking
As children build, they explore concepts like size, shape, weight, balance, and measurement. They’re also experimenting—just like young scientists and engineers!

5. Encourages Teamwork and Communication
When building with friends, children learn to share ideas, take turns, negotiate, and work together to bring their vision to life.

At home, we encourage you to save and offer safe, clean recyclables and household items for your child to use creatively. A box might become a rocket, a castle, or a cozy animal den—let their imagination lead!

 

💡 Preschool STEM in Action: Exploring Light Through Colored Water

This week in our preschool STEM corner, we dove into a magical world of light, color, and water! Using simple materials and a lot of curiosity, our little scientists experimented with how light travels through different colors—and the results were just as exciting as a rainbow!

🔍 What We Learned:

• Light can change color when it passes through a transparent material.

• Mixing colors of water shows how primary colors combine to form secondary colors.

• Observation skills were strengthened as we described what we saw using words like “glow,” “shine,” “bright,” and “colorful.”

• We practiced hypothesizing (“What do you think will happen if we mix blue and yellow water?”) and testing our ideas—just like real scientists!

 Why It Matters:

STEM at the preschool level is all about playful exploration. Through this experiment, children learned about basic physics (light and color) while also building language, fine motor, and critical thinking skills.

🏠 Try It at Home!

This is a simple and fun activity to do in your kitchen or backyard. Ask your child to predict what will happen when you shine light through a certain color—and talk about what you observe together!

 

Our July theme is 'Ocean,' and our classes are humming with activities all about the ocean. Our preschool 1 class did an art activity with jellyfish. 

The benefits of art and learning about ocean creatures are endless. 

🎨 1. Develops Fine Motor Skills

Using paintbrushes, scissors, stickers (like gluing shells), or molding playdough helps strengthen hand‑eye coordination and dexterity, essential for writing, dressing, and daily self-care

🧠 2. Supports Cognitive & Problem-Solving Growth

Blending colors, cutting shapes, and planning a craft fosters critical thinking, pattern recognition, spatial awareness, and cause-and-effect reasoning

🗣️ 3. Boosts Language & Knowledge

Talking about sea animals—names like “octopus,” “coral,” and “tide pools”—builds vocabulary. Describing features ("tentacles," "shell") enhances communication and concept learning.

😌 4. Enhances Creativity & Imagination

Thematic projects, like creating paper plate fish or playdough sea creatures, open imaginative play. They combine creative art with narrative, encouraging story-building and pretend play

🧘 5. Supports Emotional Expression & Self-Regulation

Art gives preschoolers a non-verbal way to express and process emotions. Themed crafts can be soothing—sorting shells or painting waves is calming and helps manage big feelings

 

🧭 Integration Across Curriculum

Ocean art dovetails beautifully with other learning areas:

• Math: Counting tentacles, patterns, shapes.

• Science: Floating vs. sinking, marine biology.

• Language: Ocean-themed books and new vocabulary

 “Ocean” theme—and especially the jellyfish art—anchors a rich, multi‑disciplinary learning experience. Children not only engage creatively, but also refine motor skills, language, science understanding, social cooperation, and emotional insight—all while deepening their connection to the natural world.

 Our Pre-Scholar Enrichment Program is all about STEM this summer. Today they studied magnets. Studying magnets for preschoolers offers numerous benefits that contribute to their overall development. It introduces them to geometry, physics (balance and gravity), and magnetism.