Preschool News Blog

This week’s article offers some interesting insights: “ Twelve things you were not taught in school about creative thinking”. While this is not an exhaustive list, this is article provides great thought provoking ideas about encouraging our children to be creative thinkers. As many educators, brain scientists, sociologists and “big thinkers” of our time are espousing, use of our right brain will be the determining factor of success for our children’s generation.

When we look at the core tenets of our Reggio-inspired approach to early childhood education we find tremendous correlation in this list of creative skill set development.

To read the full article, click here: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/creative-thinkering/201112/twelve-things-you-were-not-taught-in-school-about-creative-thinking

This week’s article: “Parenting the French Way, is it better?”, offers some wonderful commentary on delayed gratification, that I found… well… gratifying….. What do you think?  To read the full article, click here: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/lifestyle/2012/02/parenting-the-french-way-is-it-better/

This week’s article: “The Overextended Toddler”, talks about the pressures we all feel to “give our children every experience” and the counter perspective on giving too much. To read the full article, click here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rhiana-maidenberg/the-overextended-toddler_b_1219846.html?ref=parents

Irvine, CA — The Merage Jewish Community Center has been award a $20,000 Ignition grant by the Covenant Foundation to create the Paradigm Project for Early Childhood Jewish Education Leadership.  The Paradigm Project will expand and multiply the pool of promising young leaders in the field of Jewish early childhood education. Peter Blair, the Merage JCC’s director of Early Childhood Education has gone through Covenant Fellowship leadership training and wrote the grant to create local “Communities of Practice” composed of leaders and potential leaders (directors, leadership team members, administrators, teachers or auxiliary faculty members) of local Jewish early childhood programs in communities nationwide. Three communities have been selected to participate in the 2012 project: Southern California, Greater Miami, and Boston. Dan Bernstein, president and CEO of the Merage JCC announced the award and stated, “How proud I am of our preschool leadership in the community. Our goal is to develop the finest Jewish preschool leaders in both Orange County and other areas as well. We are happy that Peter Blair has established our school as a leader in the field.”

Each of the three Communities of Practice will meet and study together regularly, hosted and led by a Covenant Leadership Training fellow. The focus will be the exploration of core Jewish values and Best Practices and will produce a network of colleagues who maintain trusting relationships and a shared language and vision.

This is a grassroots project, organized by the educators themselves on a peer to peer level.  Each participating educator will participate in planning and leading the local learning, gaining the skills to continue to further this collaborative learning process.

According to Peter Blair, “This program capitalizes on investments previously made by the Covenant Foundation: the investment in a passionate community with a vision for Relationships, Inquiry, Reflection, and Responsibility in Jewish Early Childhood Education.  Realizing the potential of this investment will shift the paradigm and ensure lasting change in early childhood education.”

Blair summed up by stating, “By recruiting the most promising early and mid-career individuals from local communities and beyond, this program seeks to exponentially magnify their own learning and commitment to affect the national field with meaningful, deep, and lasting change.  Quality programs that share a vision, instill deep values, nurture strong bonds, and are guided by passionate educators who engage in Best Practices in Jewish early childhood education have the potential to leave an indelible mark in the lives of the children and families for generations to come.”

This week’s article: “If you can’t have the patience of a preschool teacher, you can at least have the same strategies” I posted this article to our school’s Facebook page a few days ago. It has received the strongest response of any article posted to date. I hope you enjoy it!  To read the full article, click here: http://www.boston.com/yourlife/family/blog/2007/10/today_is_the_be_1.html