September 17

Links for Little Ones

Queen Anne View, Uncategorized

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Seattle Public Schools is hosting a community meeting to discuss their capitol levy projects.  The meeting in our area in at McClure Middle School on September 27th at 6:30pm.  A list of their BEX IV proposed projects can be found here.  The highlight for our area is that they would like to increase the student population at Queen Anne Elementary by 200 students with $15.5 million in funding.  The increase would be completed by the 2019-2020 school year.

Nurturing Pathways®, a creative dance program that provides comprehensive development for babies and young children up to four years old, simultaneously encourages motor development and brain development.

    Infants spend the first year of their lives “hard wiring” their eyes, ears, taste, touch and body awareness. Their brain, like a seed, comes with the potential for growth. In the first year of life a baby’s brain will double in weight, and it will achieve 95 percent of its adult weight by the age of four.

    Nurturing Pathways® classes are designed to take advantage of this early window for global development and lay the foundation for school-readiness. Little students dance to develop motor, language, social and emotional pathways, while their caregivers hear about their child’s development and learn how to encourage further advancements at home.

    Nurturing Pathways® curriculum is divided into three age groups: babies, waddlers, and toddlers; and classes are offered five days a week at the Phinney Ridge Neighborhood Center. Registration is now open for the Fall quarter, which starts on September 18.

Roots of Empathy, starting it’s 3rd year here on Queen Anne, is looking for babies (and their parent/caregiver) to participate in the program at both Coe & Queen Anne Elementary.  The babies are typically babies from the Queen Anne community, and are between two and four months old in October.  Parents who are interested in their baby being a ROE baby this year can contact Meg Ferris, ROE coordinator at margaretferris AT mac.com .  Both schools are currently looking for babies.

The program’s goal is to develop empathy and compassion in children, and it does so by bringing a baby into the classroom for the school year and using the growth of that baby to teach empathy.  The baby is considered to be the “tiny teacher” for the students.  Indeed, the baby wears a shirt that says “teacher”.
The program was started in 1996 in Canada, and is now offered in 7 countries, including the three cities in the United States.  Because of the 2008 Seeds of Compassion conference, Seattle was picked at the first US city.
The results of the program have been pretty astonishing.  Besides fostering empathy within the children, it also has a very positive results in diminished aggression school-wide.  The students who are in the program wind up impacting the whole grade, and sometimes the entire school, with the lessons that they have integrated.  Principals have reported that bullying and misconduct dramatically declined within 6 months of their school beginning the program.

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links for little ones


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