The summer’s growing chillier and getting darker earlier and the first day of school is almost here. Whether it’s the first time for your child or the 3rd, jitters at home may be running high for the entire family. This is totally normal! Your family isn’t alone feeling this way.
“Free the child's potential, and you will transform him into the world.”
Dr Maria Montessori
First-Day Jitters
The summer’s growing chillier and getting darker earlier and the first day of school is almost here. Whether it’s the first time for your child or the 3rd, jitters at home may be running high for the entire family. This is totally normal! Your family isn’t alone feeling this way.
Fortunately there are ways to help ease these first-day-at-school nerves. The Play Lab is here to support your family through your transition into the school year to make it as seamless and exciting as possible. Below we’ll share a few helpful Montessori-based tips and links to first-day books as well as information about our new dual-language gentle Separation Anxiety Program, The Nest, for children ages 2-3 and their caregivers.
Fluorishing Independently
Parents want their children to flourish independently, learning important life, social, and educational skills, but the process of letting go can be a deeply painful one for both parent and child. This is completely normal. Around 4 to 7 months, children begin experiencing object-permanence. Up until this point, when something (or someone) was out of view, they were also out of mind. Now children realize when their favorite toy, or person, isn’t there. Suddenly even a quick trip to the bathroom can be cause for tears and alarm. This can last up until age 2, shifting into separation anxiety and making leaving your child at daycare or with a sitter challenging.
Object Permanence: The Exciting New Plateau
Object-permanence is actually an exciting milestone leading up to pretend play, language development skills, exploration, and working memory. Some games you can play with your child to help ease this transition include Peekaboo, Hide-and-Seek, and “Practice-leaving.” As you “Practice-leaving,” you can help ease your child’s anxiety by developing a goodbye ritual together with them. This can include saving kisses in special places to retrieve later, a brief explanation of what the child should expect to happen next, and a short goodbye.
A Gentle Separation at The Play Lab's Nature-Inspired Space
The Nest, The Play Lab’s Gentle Separation program, will allow you to thoughtfully extend your exploration of this transition with your child in the next phase Outside of your home, but not yet in school. Here, guided by carefully chosen childhood experts, including founder, Magda Lahliti who has over 15 years experience as a Montessori educator, you can gently shift your child into an early education setting at their own pace in a group scenario. Our techniques can be practiced and implemented interchangeably at home and in the classroom.
Establishing routines is key to helping your child feel secure. A prepared environment, sensory exploration, and spontaneous behavior through repetition help your child gain control of movement, courtesy and kindness, care of self, and care of the environment, all tenets of Montessori-philosophy.
Gathering daily in circle time, we’ll pass around our classroom mascot, a weighted stuffed animal perfect for assisting with anxiety, and focus on Montessori-themed play instilling self-confidence through problem-solving skills.
Sensory activities and responsibility-building through will be developed through our fun with art, sensory-boxes built from reclaimed materials including rice, beans, and easy-to-replicate household items like bath bombs.
Our first month will be dedicated to exploring the world through colors! Learning colors is a vital part of childhood growth and provides foundation for language-acquisition skills. Your child will also gain proficiency in French as part of our dual-language program from language-specialist, Magda Lahliti.
Early Learning Through Montessori Principles of Courtesy, Kindness, And Curiosity
Together using Montessori principles we’ll explore our new environment through child-led hands on play and experimentation. We’ll learn practical skills boosting children’s self-confidence and independence and practice treating children with respect and kindness for themselves, others, and the world of our classroom play. We’ll foster curiosity and see what makes your little one shine. The caretaker’s departure will gradually shorten until they are able to do a simple drop-off and leave, tear free.
We believe there’s a missing link between early education and preschool. With time to adjust in a relaxed social and educational setting, you can assist your child to step into their new world at their own pace and watch them thrive. The Nest is that link.
Importance of Separation Anxiety
While it can be difficult to go through, separation anxiety is a normal and important phase for your child to experience. First Attachment Theorist, British psychologist John Bowlby, who along with Sigmund Freud developed the idea of Separation Anxiety in children, believed that if handled well, this could become a strong foundation for secure bonding.
Separation Anxiety can teach your child to understand attachment (the sense of being loved and belonging in the world) and separation from loved ones as natural, unconnected, and impermanent. Our Montessori setting helps your child feel secure so that they can shift their focus onto the external world and become curious explorers, eager to learn about the rules and structure of their new world, and make new connections. It’s through becoming curious, learning new skills, and exploring that a child grows and creates themselves.
Why Dual Language
The Play Lab and its next-door sister organization, award-winning afterschool Play Kids, prioritize language classes for our young charges. Not only is this culturally important, broadening mindsets and encouraging thinking from different perspectives, studies show that even as early as 1 years old, bilingual babies perform better in attention control, problem and puzzle solving, self-control, perspective taking, and applying known concepts to unknown situations. Older bilingual students perform better on English and Math standardized testing. And learning another language for Adults helps protect against Alzheimer's Disease.
The Connection Between Learning, Hearing, And Seeing
Learning a new language is a perfect fit for the Montessori principles of interactive play through singing, chart-making, play, and other sensory activities. Research indicates the best time to expose children to other languages is as soon as possible. Between the ages of 0-3, the brains of young children are in a period of heightened plasticity, when the brain is in its most flexible stage and can easily make new neural connections.
Tips For Getting Your Child Ready For The Big Day
Getting your child ready for their big-first day include reading “first day” books with them to prepare. Great first day books we recommend are: Mouse's First Day , SOAR , Wemberly, Worried
Some daily activities include:
Create fun and light-hearted consistent morning routines
Use visual picture cards to show your child what to expect throughout the day
Create a index cards with pictures of their loved ones glued on for them to take with them to see and flip through throughout the day
Hide sweet notes in their backpack and pocket
Use Play to create a pretend “first-day” with dolls or stuffed animals
Whatever you do, the act of setting aside a few minutes of time to give your child your completely absorbed attention will go a long way to easing their jitters, and possibly even your own.
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