A Playbased Parent Cooperative in Albany, CA
Albany Preschool’s Spring Fair is just around the corner!
Come meet the Easter Bunny and join us for all sorts of fun family activities: egg hunt, cardboard maze, face painting, stuffie toss, balloon animals, games and crafts, and our signature bake sale featuring sweet and savory treats homemade by APS families. We’ll also be selling pizza cold drinks, and coffee.
Tickets (50 cents each) are available to purchase on site. Most activities cost 2-3 tickets.
See you there!
Let’s Sing “Welcome!”
It’s circle time at Albany Preschool! Children scamper to their places, settle in and sing the “Welcome Song” to each other. Then they sing it again, in Spanish…and in Hebrew, in three dialects of Chinese, Urdu, Japanese, and Polish…every single day.
Our morning and afternoon programs sing in different languages based on the staff and families in those programs. We plan to add Korean and Kyrgyz soon.
We Are All Citizens In a Multicultural World
At Albany Preschool, we’re proud of the rich cultural diversity of our students and staff. Many of our families are multiethnic or multilingual; several have recently arrived from other countries. We learn alongside and from each other, reaching across and celebrating our differences. We get to know people of many different backgrounds, religions, languages and customs.
Living Together, Working Together
We’re not the only diverse school around, of course. Our location is part of the equation; the Bay Area is a place of many colors and cultures, and people come from all over the world to study or work at UC Berkeley. This is to our advantage. Multiculturalism cannot be taught directly. It cannot be trivialized into a separate unit (“let’s have Multicultural Week!”) Rather, it’s living and working together in community every day, and learning to share with each other.
The co-op structure of our school means that families are involved and known. People are, after all, what make APS. Teachers, parents and students each bring something special to the table. A wise person once said, “There’s a tour guide in all of us!”–that is, deep down, most people enjoy guiding others through something they know well. Sharing something dear and personal helps a student feel accepted and appreciated. That feeling of belonging is so important; some call it a prerequisite to growth, and therefore to learning.
Whether it’s a child newly arrived from Taiwan teaching the class to sing in Mandarin, a Polish grandmother teaching the children how to make plaki in the school kitchen, or a mother from Japan showing our teachers and parent participators how to make sushi for future snacks, the culture of our families provides the scaffold for our learning.
Long noodles and tangerines for snack. May we all have a long and lucky life!
Posted by Albany Preschool on Saturday, February 11, 2017
More tasty foods we serve at snack time: pupusas, homemade tortillas, rice triangles, seaweed rice bowls, kim bap (stuffed seaweed rice rolls), long noodles, fried rice, mochi, kugel, and latkes.
On that delicious note, let’s keep delighting in our differences. Let’s show our children how to treat each other with kindness, respect, and appreciation while their minds are open and their hearts soft. Let’s look one other in the eye, sing in our many languages, and hold hands out to each other in welcome.
in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious…
when the world is puddle-wonderful…
e.e. cummings
The abundant rain this season has been welcome to our drought-thirsty state. But for parents of preschoolers, wet weather can create difficulties: how in the world are we supposed to keep our children entertained indoors for days on end? We come up with lists of “rainy-day activities,” bring out stashed toys and books and videos, and grit our teeth until it’s perfect outside again.
As parents, we protect our children instinctively from hunger, injury, and exposure; that’s basically our job description. But guess what? A bit of rain is just fine! Rain itself can’t make you sick. It can certainly make you wet and muddy. While adults might be uncomfortable getting messy, for children playing in the rain is pure joy. Everything is different and magical when it rains, and getting dirty is just part of the fun. Outdoor play, especially in the rain, helps children build all kinds of useful skills:
PHYSICAL
Agility
Balance
Coordination
Sharper perceptions in all five senses
PSYCHOLOGICAL
Confidence
Resilience
Ability to assess risks
Creativity
Endurance
At Albany Preschool, we use the rain to our advantage. We run, sing, dig, jump, and really PLAY in the rain. We love digging trenches, making mud pies and structures in the rain, and splashing around in all that awesome water. All that’s needed is boots, enthusiasm and a cozy change of clothes afterward. Now that’s one truly excellent rainy-day activity.
It’s that time! Is your child ready for preschool? Join us for an open house on Saturday, January 21, 2017, from 10 am to noon at 850 Masonic Ave in Albany. Come see what we’re all about, meet teachers and families, and enjoy our special guest: Tracy The Animal Guy and his Fur, Scales and Tails show.
We have immediate openings in the Afternoon Program for the remainder of the 2016-2017 school year. If you’re interested in scheduling a tour, please contact info@albanypreschool.org.
We’re also now accepting applications for the 2017-2018 school year! Turn in your application by February 1 for priority consideration.
We have read books and sung songs with intention: About falling leaves turning colors and why they do, the weather changes in autumn, and the harvest season, along with all of the fun and other stories and activities that having a good time in preschool begs.
We have used branches, twigs and bark, pinecones (large, small and tiny), pine needles, seedpods, ferns, flowers, rose hips, and more in our play and in our process art. We have collected beautiful fallen leaves from our own north and south playgrounds, incorporated them in our play dough structures, washed them in our water table to better observe their beautiful changing colors, painted with them, tried leaf rubbings, and used them in a multimedia fall-color collage.
We look forward not only to expanding our understanding of this beautiful season, but also to finding out what emerges from our playful daily constructions and inquiries, both individual and collective!
Our preschoolers might have been a bit shocked when we told them they were allowed to “wrestle” at school this week. Of course we meant “play wrestling” and emphasized this was all fun and games.
We set up the tumbling mats nearly every day in the South Yard, and the children took turns play wrestling with each other.
Children love to play rough and providing them a safe environment to do it in can be an excellent learning experience. Play wrestling is a non-aggressive way to allow children to test their limits of strength, teaches them to take turns, and gives them the opportunity to begin defining their own personal boundaries, as well as the personal boundaries of those around them.
Play wrestling is fun! Which means the children are cheering each other on, smiling, laughing, and of course remaining friends even after climbing, rolling and sitting on one another.
Our preschoolers have been busy cooking up masterpieces in the kitchen – the mud kitchen that is! Hours are spent mixing, pouring, transporting, plating and serving. They are loving the opportunity to mimic “home” play.
Mud kitchens have some structure given a defined kitchen space with a well stocked variety of loose parts – pots, pans, dishes and utensils. However, they are designed to give preschoolers free opportunity to collect their own ingredients from the outdoor environment – flowers, leaves, sticks, and of course, mud – so be sure there is plenty of water.
The opportunities are endless – a chocolate mud pie, a lobster stew, a birthday cake, and whatever else they can mix up. And that’s what keeps them coming back again and again and again.
Bon appetit!
The art table is always open (and quite popular) at Albany Preschool. Every day an art project is announced at circle, and as soon as circle ends, our preschoolers rush to grab an empty seat. We make art with paint, tape, balls, fabric, cars, recyclables, yarn, sticks, rocks, our own hands, and so much more. You name it, we can make something with it.
We know that kids love art, but why do we love art so much? Art stimulates both sides of the brain, boosts self-esteem, strengthens hand-eye coordination, teaches open ended thinking, and helps children exercise their creative problem solving skills.
Next time your child brings home their masterpiece, further the learning experience by talking to them about it. Say things like – How did you make that? Tell me about your picture. I see you mixed paints to make new secondary colors. I see different shapes, line patterns, brush strokes. And if you can, try avoiding value judgements such as – That’s beautiful, I like it, etc.
You can have fun at home with art too. It can be as simple as dipping an old toothbrush in paint, stamping with rocks, cutting and gluing toilet paper tubes. Get creative – there is no wrong way to do it.
Our Stone Soup celebration this Fall was a ravishing success. Each child brought in their favorite veggies to add to the community pot – carrots, broccoli, carrots, potatoes, turnips, and yes, more carrots. But the real stars of the soup were the vegetables and herbs we grew from our very own garden. We planted, watered, watched and waited until the day came to pick. The herbs the children harvested were the perfect finishing touch to our stone soup.
Along with gardening our own vegetables, our preschoolers made their very own bread from scratch. We ground wheat berries into flour using a mortar and pestle -and it was SO hard! – so we switched to a french stone grinder.
From berries, to flour, to bread, and from seeds to vegetables, our preschoolers experienced a true farm to table meal – a yummy one too!