Month by Month

The Daycare
Community

When children come from such diverse spiritual backgrounds and the changing nature of our world makes finding the rhythms of nature increasingly difficult, the question of how to celebrate our days is one that must live in all caregivers so they can discover their own answer.   However, I feel it's beneficial to share our answers with each other to enrich our inner and outer lives.   These pages are in response to those who have asked me to offer suggestions for activities, stories and songs that are appropriate for infants and preschoolers.   I share here the ever-changing results of my contemplations and work with children.

• Each monthly page contains some basic components,
  • a color
  • a direction
  • festivals of the season
  • a meditation that coordinates with the chakra of the season
  • a nursery rhyme for the month
  • a song for the month
  • the seasonal archangelic influences
  Because of my personal upbringing, heritage and geographic location, these pages primarily reflect European, Christian traditions and beliefs and the seasons in the northern hemisphere.   I open my arms to suggestions and contributions from readers to flesh out the offerings here and educate me on traditions that I am unfamiliar with.   My hope is that these topics will become richer and deeper and new topics will be added while still maintaining a fairly simple, easy to implement form.

Color

I see the seasons tinted as if you laid a color wheel over the circle of the year, with blue starting on the feast of Epiphany and the twelve holy days of Christmas pure white .   This means that sometimes the months are not neatly all one color, but that their pages will change as time passes, as will this monthly page and some other parts of the website.   This seasonal relationship to color is not something that we teach directly to the children but instead use it in subtle ways around the daycare.   Those who devote their lives to working with children know that it is the minute touches and unspoken gestures of the environment that work on souls and spirits to strengthen not only their creativity and imagination but their physical, mental and emotional health.   There are many traditions surrounding color so we can all pick and choose the ones that we resonate with or honor from our own culture.

Direction and Element

There is not always agreement between traditions about which direction aligns itself with which season and element.   In my work, these two are of less importance but I still feel they are fodder for meditation, so I include my interpretations of them on the page. I encourage you to ponder these things in your own heart if you're so inclined and to ignore them if you're not.

the Seasons: spring, summer, autumn, winter

In a calendar more in tune with nature than numbers, the year can be divided into eight parts.   First by solstice and equinox of the sun and then by the cross-quarter celebrations that fall roughly in between the first four.   For time out of mind these points in the year have been cause for celebration.   On the monthly pages I list first the pre-Christian name of the holiday, then Christian name, and lastly the modern, non-denominational name, if there is one.   On the seasonal page I go into more detail about these celebrations.

Meditation

The word meditation seems to be a negative one for some people; either it conjures up images of pretzel shaped zombies, or vacant staring cult worshipers or maybe merely an attractive but unattainable state of serenity.   Let me assure you, on this website the word implies none of those things but instead, a healing contemplation or, more practically, a fleeting thought to cling to in the rush of the day.   Chakras, too, seem a little "woo woo" to many Americans.   However, here the term denotes simply the major energy centers in the body.   In most traditions there are seven of these, to coordinate with the seven colors of the rainbow.   But as I work with the chakras and the colors, I just can't quite get my head or heart around the idea of indigo.   In the traditional color wheel there are six colors, and this is the basis that I work from with the chakras.   The meditations reflect the color of the season and the part of the body that color coordinates with.

One of the best explanations that I have found on the healing aspects of the chakras is at Dr. Christine Northrup's website.   While she and I differ a little in the area of the head ( I connect ear, nose and throat while she puts ears and nose with the eyes,) I have nothing but the highest respect for her work.   If only more doctors were like her!

Nursery Rhyme

Though books and stories are important, the missing step before them that is so often overlooked is the humble nursery rhyme.   Nursery rhymes are of vital importance to preschoolers.   I cannot stress this too much.   To begin with, "they are the first furnishings of the mind; the bottom-most layer of the comfortable hereditary clutter of mottoes, proverbs and half-remembered tales that we use to ornament conversations throughout our lives, knowing that they are common currency," as Iona Opie so eloquently puts it in the foreword of Michael Foreman's Nursery Rhymes. But there is so much more!   Again, I'm going to call on others who have already written extensively on this subject to explain to you, with the wonderful article by Suzanne Down, The Healing art of Nursery Rhymes, and Why Nursery Rhymes? by Danny and Kim Alderman.   Repetition is of vital importance for small children, and when you say the nursery rhymes to them they will insist upon it with "again!"   Be sure to repeat the rhyme at least three times for them each day for the whole month.   This is more curative than you can imagine.

Song

"If you can talk, you can sing, if you can walk, you can dance" goes an old proverb from Zimbabwe.   I don't want to hear any excuses for not singing around your child.   I've heard them all and none of them except "I have no larynx" holds any water with me.   If you don't know any songs, make some up.   If you think you "can't carry a tune," guess what?   Neither can your child.   And unless you put the thought in their head that only people with socially acceptable singing voices should raise theirs in song, your child will never believe that.   There's a special place in purgatory for every teacher who told a child to mouth the words while the others sang, who excluded a child from choir, who made a child feel that the arts belong only to those born with a gift.   Don't get me started here or I'll go on and on and on.   Just sing.   Sing the songs I give you here or sing something else.   Sing a child's song or a grown-up song or a church song or a drinking song (clean it up a little please) or sing "Twinkle twinkle little star."   Just sing.   Repetition is important so you don't need to know very many songs.   You can sing the same ones over and over again.   Just sing.   Sing.   Sing.

Archangels

I know that for some of you talking about angels is just a little too something: too religious, too new-agey, too unscientific, too unprovable, too....you fill in the blank.   So, skip this part if you're one of those people.   But if you like to think about angels, or wonder about angels, or, like me, were taught that there are not only angels of all shapes, sizes and dispositions out there but that you have your very own angel whose sole responsibility is to watch over you from the day you're born til the day you die, then maybe you'll enjoy this little section.   In anthroposophy there is the teaching that four of the archangels watch over the seasons and those are the ones we will talk about here.   Even if you don't "believe" in angels, you may find it interesting to think about them in a metaphorical sense and contemplate the influences that they represent.

One aspect of Steiner's work on angels is the concept that the angel of the "opposite" season is "coming from beneath."   So where the angel of the season is coming to us from outside of our bodies, the angel of the opposite season is strengthening us within our bodies.   So I remind us of both of these aspects on each monthly page.   On the archangel page I have selective quotes from Steiner.