Hope you all had a fabulous Easter weekend, celebrating the arrival of spring with beautiful weather and spending time with loved ones. It’s hard to believe that we came back to school on Monday, and all of a sudden, it was April! We are officially ¼ of the way through 2024 and just two months of school left in the 2023-2024 school year! In each of the class news sections below, we give you the number of classes left in the school year. Keep this in mind as you sit in the gazebo, use every opportunity to set up get togethers before the end of the school year, summer plans, play dates, mom’s and dad’s nights or weekends, maybe even group camp site weekends, class family barbecues or s’more evenings. The Childrens’ Garden is an amazing foundation for your child’s education – but it is also an excellent community building program. Take advantage of every opportunity to build your community with people with similar ideas about education, parents going through the same struggles and triumphs with their preschooler that you are, and a group of fun families who enjoy spending time with other families having fun.

Would you like to go to prom with me? The staff can’t wait to party with you all to celebrate this wonderful school year and all the fun and friendships that came along with it. Make sure that you purchase your tickets for this fun event, get your dancing shoes ready, your prom outfits and your childcare set up! It’s going to be a memorable evening!

Our focus in the classroom is now turning to Spring! Planting seeds, growing butterflies, watching the life cycle of trees begin again – and our Art Show, Butterfly Teas and Graduation. We are winding down the school year but turning up the memory making! Make sure each of these events is on your calendar!

Ladybugs

Sweet Ladybugs, only 17 more sessions with these littlest littles. They are not acting like Ladybugs anymore – these kiddos are full on ready for Cricket Class! We celebrated Cambrie’s birthday on Tuesday and Coco’s birthday on Thursday. We had fun painting with watercolors and Qtips and read some fun books about “Worm Weather” and began learning our dances for our Spring Art Show. As we move out of parallel play, we are now learning about sharing, taking turns and being inclusive. Dress-ups are always a fun activity for the Ladybugs, and we have so much fun playing with the princesses, Tinkerbells and cowboys as they move about the classroom.

Crickets

25 Cricket classes left! 25 more times of dropping off snacks in the snack wagon and waiting in the gazebo for your 4-year-old to run down the brick path excited to see you! Can you believe it? We had a fun week with our Crickets this week, reading some wonderful books about spring, beginning to learn our dances for our Spring Art Show, and having fun on the playground as we watched our fall planted bulbs grow and blossom in every nook and cranny! We talked about tattling, big deal vs. little deal, and if we are having strong emotions, to move to a different activity to help change our attitude! That’s a pretty big lesson for a four-year-old! We had fun painting with Qtips and watercolors and enjoyed building zoos and train tracks and towers of blocks with bears and whales on them. We started learning some fun dances for the Art Show and we also enjoyed learning that no matter who our Cricket Comrade is, we can have fun at snack time!

Honeybees

34 Honeybee classes left! Goodness, Gracious, things are getting real! During these last few months, we have seen the same thing that we see every single year – our Honeybees have developed into a team. Currently, it is a team of students vs. the staff, but we know, that as our kiddos realize that their time at The Garden is coming to an end, that they grow to include the staff on their team as well.

We had fun this week preparing for our Art Show. We completed our drawings of our bodies, our interviews with Brin for our biographies and finished up our self-portraits. Self-portraits are amazing pieces of a moment in time, friends. Each of our bees looks at a mirror as they draw each eye, their nose and their lips. It is amazing to watch their concentration. We hope you can all make it to The Art Show on April 26^th, at 6:30 at Issaquah Middle School. We started to learn our dances for the Art Show, both dances are complicated!

We had lots of fun at our World’s Fair. Each of our Honeybees took a turn at the microphone, telling us about their country, and what they enjoyed learning the most. We are so proud of our Bees and their presentations. They each did a fabulous job. On Monday, we displayed our Presentation Boards, and our Bees stood by their boards to answer questions about their country, and practice using their big kid voices to respond to questions. What an amazing experience for all of us!

Have a great spring break everyone! Don’t forget to purchase your tickets to PROM, 2024!