DON’T FORGET TO PICK UP YOUR TAKE HOME CRAFTS FOR THE WEEK! This week we are making Valentines for our feathered friends by making an easy, fruit loop bird feeder!

Happy Valentine’s Day! Valentine’s Day is this Sunday, February 14^th so for Storytime we read about love and feelings. The books we read are “If You Were Spaghetti” by Kevin & Haily Meyers, and “In My Heart, A Book of Feelings” by Jo Witek.

Week 2.8.21 Storytime books

Looking for fun, easy crafts for Valentine’s Day? Check out some ideas here: https://www.teachingmama.org/valentines-crafts-for-toddlers/

And here: https://www.messylittlemonster.com/2020/01/valentines-day-crafts-for-toddlers.html?m=1

Children have big emotions and it is never too early to begin helping them communicate their emotions in a healthy manner.

A fun, simple way of broadening a child’s emotional vocabulary is to make thumb print feelings. Use finger paint to have your child make a number of thumb prints on paper. Then draw faces onto the thumb prints and label them with different emotions such as happy, sad, nervous, excited, scared, embarrassed, silly, proud, etc…

Social emotional learning is an important process which helps children manage their emotions, show kindness & empathy , and create positive relationships with others. An easy way to incorporate this into every day life is by asking children how they think a character feels when reading a book together.

Our Letter of the Week is “X”. Since there are very few words that begin with x (xylophone begins with x but can be tricky to explain that it does not have an x sound), it is fine to focus on the ending x sound for words like box, fox, and mix.

A fun craft for learning about X is to make your very own x-ray! All you need is some black construction paper, a white crayon, a few q-tips, and your child’s hand. Trace the outline of your child’s hand onto the black paper and then have them glue their “bones” onto it to make an x-ray!