Covid has come and come and changed our lives and the lives of our little ones. We are all learning how to live with it and make the best of it. As child care providers we learn to encourage children to share and play together, now we are forced to tell the children to play individually and not share supplies. We have to find ways of giving children the social interactions they need. In a Montessori setting the classrooms have shelves for each subject, the children are free to roam around the room and pick which work they want. Instead of giving each subject a shelf we have been giving each child a shelf with a couple works on each subject. We still disinfect the work and toys daily but it limits the amount of sharing that is done. Normally, we switch shelves every week, we have turned it into a game of “Find Your Shelf” on Mondays. Instead of having the children pick random seats we have assigned a seat to each child and a rug for each child which they can unroll when they use. It allows the children to have freedom of doing work on a table or rug but still be safe. This has taken up a bit more room in our classroom, adding more shelves and tables but it has also helped make the parents feel more comfortable sending in their children. We all need social interactions, now is when we should be more mindful about it. Circle time is done at the tables as well as other group activities.
Emmanuel Hope Children's House 