Weekly Updates (Two Weeks Combined)

Good Morning,

I am so sorry for the delay in updates from last week. I decided this morning that I would update on this week (so far) and last week collectively because we have had a lot of fun stuff going on in Medical Daycare. Last week to kick off St Patrick's Day, we had the Boston Police Pipes & Drums come in to parade around our building and in our gym. It was seriously so awesome!! The kids really loved it and majority of them were not scared of the loud noises...they were quite impressed and amazed. After the Boston Police did their performance, they stopped to walk around and let the kids play their instruments and chat with our students. It was a really special and fun day...definitely not one to miss! After the celebration, I made edible playdoh for our students that was green and very tasty. The students enjoyed playing with it and the best part was that they could eat it after playing with it...some of them couldn't get enough of it while others just were not impressed :-) Here is the recipe for anyone that is interested:

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"This recipe makes enough for a class of 20 students:

Ingredients:

2 Boxes of Vanilla/White Cake Mix

2 Sticks of Butter

Water as needed

Food Dye or Frosting (that is color of choice) *I used frosting just in case students had allergy to food dyes

Directions:

Soften butter in the microwave but do not completely melt it. Mix in a large bowl with the vanilla cake mix. Slowly add tablespoons of water to help mix the ingredients together – but do not add too much so that it stays firm like playdoh. Lastly, add the food dye or frosting and mix all together. After it is mixed and has a “playdoh” consistency, keep everything in the bowl, cover with foil and refrigerate it for 24 hours over night. After it has been refrigerated, you can take a spoon, ice cream scooper, or hands and roll the dough into balls to make it easier to hand out to children."

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Aside from playing with edible playdoh and listening to music, we engaged in color explosion crayola projects, scratch art, and continued working on our collaborative paintings which are turning out so beautiful. To start this week off, we traveled to TD Garden in Boston to go to the Sports Museum that is located on the 5th and 6th floors of the garden. To our surprise, the whole Boston Bruins team was on the ice early in the morning practicing for their big game Monday night against the Canadians. The staff at TD Garden let us sit in the "Patron Lounge" which was a really nice box suite with leather seats and couches. We watched the Bruins have a team practice for about 20-30 minutes, and then continued our private tour of the venue and stopped to look at all of the memorabilia in the glass cases. It was really fun and an awesome experience. The children really enjoyed it. 

Since then we have been continuing practicing our fine motor skills by writing our names, practicing our accuracy with bingo markers, and tracing lines while holding a pencil to fine tune those skills and abilities. The preschool class seems to have mastered shapes and color recognition, so now we are moving on to nouns ~ specifically focusing on animals right now (and the noises they make). Other than that, we have also been getting messy with our paint...switching between printmaking with bubble wrap, finger painting, using sponges, and painting with cotton. It has been a lot of fun!

I hope you enjoy the pictures.... I took a lot :-)

Have a great rest of your week and enjoy your weekend of warm weather (hopefully). We were suppose to get a blizzard today in Boston, but so far I am not seeing anything.

Best,

Allison Aubry 

Personal Reflection

Good Morning Everyone! Happy first day of spring....it kind of feels warm today and I think we will be reaching at least 55 degrees today, which will feel so warm to us after this bitter cold winter.

The other day I was talking to the fellow nurses and staff I work with in the medical daycare on a daily basis. We were talking about our birthdays and when we were born, and I mentioned that I was born six weeks early. I was a premature baby, suppose to be born in January and decided to come out for an early arrival in November...November 23rd. 1990 to be exact. I was so tiny when I came out, that I had to be put in an incubator for the first few weeks of my life. My lungs were too tiny and not quite developed yet. The doctors and staff at the hospital in Media, Pennsylvania were trying experimental medicine to help me develop and live. This was back in 1990 - before some of the modern technology and medicine we have today. It makes me feel old because it is even before cell phones and digital cameras, because my parents and family took pictures of me in the hospital with Polaroids! I was a fighter when I was younger, overcoming the problems that come with an early birth with the love and care of my family and the doctors at the hospital. Even when I was finally healthy enough to be brought home, my father accidentally sat on me on the couch....I was that tiny and unnoticeable (don't worry, It turned out nothing was wrong and that my mother had a panic attack from the incident).  Today, I am a college graduate and a full time teacher at a hospital...so I think it is safe to say even with adversity I've turned out to be a successful individual.

I am sharing this with everyone because of the little bit of irony in my life. I've started out as a premature baby with medical issues, and now I am teaching toddlers and pre-school students who have entered this world in similar situations. Leanne, the lead nurse in Medical Daycare, said to me "Well that's cool, you were born as a preemie and now you are teaching these kids!". It is funny how life turns out and how much I can relate to the children at the Franciscan Hospital for Children, even if I do not remember the early stages of my life. I was also born with a mild bleeding disorder, von Willebrand's disease, that my parents discussed I had when I hit my head on a metal popcorn bowl and had severe and unusual bruising on my head. From then on, I was brought to many doctors for testing, probing, picking, etc. I still cringe at the thought of needles, getting shots and blood drawn....something I have not seen to grow out of even at twenty-three years old. :-)

I hope you enjoy the old fashion pictures. I thought some of the families and viewers of the blog would appreciate the irony of everything...

Best,

Allison

Weekly Updates

Hello Everyone -

Sorry this is a day or two late. I was having trouble getting pictures uploaded. Last week was a really fun and productive week. We went on a field trip to the Children's Museum in Boston and had a lot of fun. There was a huge Hood milk carton outside to greet us, and all of the rooms in the museum were so amazing. We spent most of our time in the music room, water play, bubble room, and an arcade type room. The students have fun exploring, discovering, and playing with each other. We were greeted by such nice staff and at one point it even seemed like we had the museum to our self. When it was finally time to head back to school, everyone was hungry and exhausted. We quickly ate our lunch and took a very long nap :-) !

Last week, we continued working on our collaborative paintings, playdoh activities, and iPad eBooks. The students work hard on activities during circle learning time in order to gain access to an eBook on the iPad. We have read the Three Little Pigs, Toy Story, Monsters INC, and the Jungle Book. The interactive features of the books on the iPad help the children follow along in reading and keep their interest. Of course, I switch between old fashion traditional hard back books, but also stay up to date with technology by using eBooks. The combination of the two are great tools for learning.

The students in both the pre-school and toddler room have been practicing their fine motor skills by tracing the shapes of letters with bingo markers. Students are attempting to hit circles accurately within the shape of the letter. We will be working on this each week - to help us learn letter recognition but also to help the students to have better accuracy within their fine motor skills and abilities. They are also able to translate this recognition into being able to write and recognize their own names and also the names of their peers.

We also continued with shape and color recognition, and also counting numbers. I think in the next upcoming weeks I am going to mix in more complex vocabulary flash cards along with noun recognition. The students are really getting good at these recognition and understanding and are benefiting from the constant recognition, but I still believe it is important to mix it up a little to keep them interested and entertained while learning!

For this weeks art activity, we were working with color wonder markers by crayola. This included scratch art pictures and using magic markers to reveal color on magical paper. It was really fun and the students enjoyed the "no mess" markers. The markers only worked on the magic paper and couldn't get on their hands or table! It was really fun to watch them work.

We also celebrated "Winter Fest" at the hospital last week which included a real live magician showing us some tricks in the gym along with a great band to play music for us. We had a lot of fun even though we are kind of bummed that it is still so cold that we can call a carnival this time of a year a "winter" fest...

I hope everyone had a great St Patricks Day weekend and celebration. I was at the South Boston parade myself and had a lot of fun. We did a lot of fun celebration in the classroom which included green edible playdoh....:-) Pictures to follow in next weeks post!!

Thanks for stopping by...

Best,

Allison