As January comes to a close we're reflecting on the last few weeks of school and all the fun we've had! It has been a jam packed month with Teddy Bear Affairs, admissions tours and observations, visits in our classrooms from Delta Pilot, Rachael Burnside and El Vaquero, Mr. Angel Vigil, a deep-dive into the world of birds, a Developmental Milestones Panel for parents and meeting our new Johnny Townhouse teacher Morgan.

As we look toward February we're not sure how it's going to top the fun we had this month but we're sure going to try! We have Special Friends Day (schedule in All Aboard), re-enrollment and we will have our blue Valentine's Day mailbox in the foyer. We hope your kids (or you!) will share the love with our faculty. Your cards will be delivered by the Johnny T's on Valentine's Day!

​Happy New Year! We enjoyed welcoming everyone back to school this week, and it was such fun to see so many smiling, happy faces coming through the doors at Paddington! We hope you  enjoyed a restful and relaxing holiday break and had the opportunity to spend lots of time with family and friends. It is always nice to take some time to slow down and move at a different pace.
 
The faculty and staff at Paddington returned to school a day in advance of the children and spent some time cleaning and reorganizing classrooms, changing art on bulletin boards, setting up new and exciting dramatic play areas, and planning engaging curriculum units for the coming weeks.
 
We also gathered together as a staff for a presentation on social and emotional development from Anne Mairs, who in addition to teaching in the Benjamin Bunny classroom, serves as Paddington’s Social and Emotional Curriculum Writer. Anne has spent a great deal of time this year studying various theorists and reading the work of authors on early childhood social and emotional development. She has also attended many workshops and trainings in the Denver area on this important topic.
 
In addition, Anne has met with teachers in our monthly age level meetings to gather feedback, exchange ideas, and share classroom strategies for supporting the social and development of children at Paddington. Through Anne’s work and via staff collaboration, we plan to create our own social and emotional curriculum that will be implemented school-wide to support children in our classrooms. We greatly value the importance of providing strategies to help children identify feelings, regulate powerful emotions, problem solve, navigate a variety of social situations, and make friends.
 
Anne shared the following with us on Monday:
 
"What behaviors lead to friendship? Several discrete behaviors that young children engage in during play with each other are directly related to having friends (Tremblay, Strain, Hendrickson & Shores, 1981). That is, children who do more of these behaviors are more likely to have friends."
 

• Getting a friend's attention
• Sharing: Both requesting and giving toys
• Initiating and organizing play
• Giving compliments

 
We look forward to observing the continued growth and development of your wonderful children over the next few months, and encouraging new friendships. We are grateful for the support of the Paddington community as we work together to instill a love of learning through play in children.