The end of the school year has arrived at Centro San José, marking another year of dedicating ourselves to the comprehensive development of the preschool boys and girls in the Jardines of San Juan Community, Ajusco, Mexico.
The feast that commemorates the end of the academic year is always a moment of joy, and the children attend, elegantly dressed and accompanied by their families. At the same it is a moment of sadness, due to the goodbyes that we must say. For the three-year-old preschoolers, their goodbye is final, and their time of formation with us has ended.
For the teachers of the three-year-old preschoolers, the party marked the conclusion of a long road of accompanying thirty-eight children and their families in their training at Centro San José for three consecutive years. Their next class will be at the primary school, where they will continue their formation.
The feast began with a Mass of Thanksgiving, a beautiful celebration and a good time for the families to show their gratitude for the training and care their children have received at the center. Centro San José also shows their appreciation to the families for the comprehensive work they have done: their involvement, dedication and collaboration with the center in the development of their children throughout the school year.
The work of the parents in the training of their children is important and a big help in their development. The children attend the center daily to play, learn and have fun. Then, it is the continuity at home, where their training in the first stages of life is completed, and they learn values, virtues, skills and knowledge.
We finish this academic cycle with another great achievement: thirty-eight children will attend the primary school to continue their training. The other seventy children will advance to the next levels at Centro San José. At the same time, we will receive a good number of new students and continue to offer this support to the community.
In the month of February, educators at Centro San José of the CSP in Mexico City plan activities for the children to learn about the importance of friendship and to work on the development of social skills.
Presently, the center attends daily to 110 children between the ages of two and six. It is quite common to witness conflicts between children. They fight for a variety of reasons: over a toy, or over any object that they believe is their own, or because a friend doesn’t want to play, or just to be first in line, or because someone made a face or stuck out his tongue or pushed them…
These fights are normal with children of this age group, and many children defend themselves by hitting a classmate or crying out of frustration. Some prefer to go tell the teachers, who tell them over and over again, “Hands are for touching, not hitting”… with irregular success.
On a daily basis, teachers at Centro San José spend much of their time resolving conflicts and misunderstandings. During the month of February, the teachers made an effort to work on the importance of friendship, in order to promote love, respect and affection among the children for their classmates.
On February 14, St. Valentine’s Day, Day of Love and Friendship, educators, together with children, organized an activity so that the children could show their appreciation to their companions at the center. They all brought a little gift to exchange with their classmates. It actually was a very moving activity, filled with thoughtful gestures and hugs.
We want to promote the bonds of friendship among the children at Centro San José, so that they learn, already at their very young age, to respect each other, to apologize when there has been a clash, to treat each other nicely and to value the others as real treasures in their lives.
In a society as demanding as ours, it is essential to create a solid educational foundation that promotes the learning and healthy development of children. This is the work that we carry out on a daily basis at the San Jose Community Center for Child Development in Mexico City.
In the 2016-2017 school year, which just ended, 36 boys and girls completed satisfactorily the preschool curriculum. On July 14, to celebrate this achievement, the children were surrounded by friends and family at a happy and grateful “end of the year” party. This is a story with a happy ending, that is repeated each year in the town of Jardines de San Juan.
The work at the center will continue with the remaining 72 boys and girls who will advance to the next level, with almost 40 more who will join the new school year, beginning at the end of August. The spaces are already filled because parents wanted to enroll their children as soon as possible, in order to give them this gift of growth, development and learning.
Since the first day of class (already in the distant past) we engaged in games, activities and learning on a daily basis. The children grew in an environment of healthy coexistence, learning to respect one another, to play together, to share what they have in the center, to accept each other and sometimes to forgive each other, after a fight. This coexistence, adequate nutrition and the tireless work of the educators, all helped to bring about this happy ending for the 2016-2017 school year. We said goodbye to 36 children who completed PreSchool 3, and now are ready to go to elementary school. In a moment as important as this one, the parents and family wanted to be close to their children. In fact, they are proud of the goals they achieved and committed to the road that lies ahead. It was an emotional day, and recognizing how much the children have grown and learned, we, too, share the joy of this happy ending.
Promotion of Early Childhood Reading at the San José Center in Ajusco, Mexico
A few months ago, Abriendo Nuevos Caminos Association was selected to participate in the project Libro abierto (An Open Book), organized by IBBY Mexico and Ghandi Bookstore. Abriendo Nuevos Caminos supports the work that the Community of St. Paul is carrying out in the San José Center for Child Development in Ajusco, Mexico City.
The project promotes early childhood reading: it attempts to reach out to children through books, to train facilitators who read aloud, and to create the space in which children can imagine what they are hearing. In order to accomplish these goals, two people from the San José Center completed a 40 hour training course and committed to the task of promoting reading among our children, through the practice of storytelling. The following is the testimony of one of them, Yomaira Cordero:
«For me, to be a reading facilitator has been a new experience. To create a reading space with and for the children is very fulfilling; it’s also something new and different for them, who no longer see reading as a boring activity, but as fun, as a real game.
It is good to provide the tools so that the children become involved in reading, and through it, understand that they can express themselves and discover an attractive new world. They discover that they can express new emotions, they find new ways of getting to know their own environment. And all of this is accomplished always with respect, solidarity and fellowship. A very significant aspect of this project is that parents can have closer communication with their own children, because they go once a week to the classroom to tell stories to the kids.»
From the San José Center we would like to thank the Gandhi Bookstore for the 455 books they donated to us. May the little ones continue to nourish their passion for reading!
