Wow! Another beautiful Children’s Garden Valentine’s celebration is complete! The staff lovingly calls each of these special days, The High Holy Days of Children’s Garden – Lunar New Year, Valentine’s, Leprechaun Day, Butterfly Tea Day, along with our events, Apple Fest, Harvest Feast, Winter Celebration, Egg Hunt and Art Show, and Honeybee Graduation…They sure do seem to come around more rapidly each year! Our next special day, Leprechaun Day, is quickly approaching, and that is a day that the students are invited to bring someone to school with them to help them search for gold on the playground and show us a fun little trick that they do together. Typically, the kiddos invite their Dads or Grandpas to this event, but any adult that they want to invite is welcome. Leprechaun Day for Ladybugs and Honeybees is Thursday, March 14 and Crickets Leprechaun Day is Friday, March 15.

We love to watch the children eagerly ‘mail’ their sweet greetings and then excitedly retrieve their ‘mailboxes’ at the end of the session. We hope you enjoyed emptying their envelopes with them and finding all the lovely notes and treats. Thank you also for the lovely treats and goodies for the staff. We sure do feel the love.

We had our Board of Trustees meeting Tuesday evening, and all things are flowing smoothly! Thank you, Trustees! If you have any questions or interest in joining the Board or be on a committee, please talk to a staff member or a Board Member.

The Ladybugs practiced their scissor skills making heart puzzles and reassembling them. Pretty cute! We also worked on a sweet little rhyming book about loving animal family members, as well as human family members.  We celebrated Sana’s 3^rd trip around the sun on Thursday.  

The Crickets practiced tracing their names and their ‘love notes’ – so sweet! We continued to work on our Art Show piece based on shapes that we learned, the crickets had fun cutting out hearts, learning more about checking in with our friends and reading each other’s feelings, and we had so much fun dancing with our classmates on Valentine’s Day.

The Honeybees completed their Favorite Animal reports and worked with Emily to draw their favorite animal. These portraits are so beautiful, and we can’t wait for you to see them at our Spring Art Show. We are so impressed with their love notes that they wrote. Please note the space between words and their punctuation usage. We hope you enjoy them also. We finished working on our 100 charts. Some of the students worked diligently to write all the numbers in one day. Some of the students spread it out over a couple of days and some students only got up to 20 or 30. It’s all good. The teachers were more interested in showing the Honeybees how you could look down a row or across a row and see the same numeral in each row, either the first numeral or the second numeral. We love watching the ‘light bulb’ go on as they recognize things like that! We celebrated Olivia’s 5 ½ year old birthday on Monday.

Well, we are at that point of the year where we begin to prepare for our Honeybee World Culture Reports. All the reports that we have done so far have been preparation for this culmination report. This is not a one-page report as our others have been, but we ask for several pictures of the country and samples of the flag, the food, the clothing, the money, the schools, the music, the animals, the houses, etc. The children are invited to bring a sample of the food, look at the flag of the country and include it in their presentation, find their country on a world map, tell us how far their country is from where we live, how we would get to the country and how long it would take to get there. They can wear clothes from the country or bring artifacts from the country. They can teach us how to say “Hello” in that country. As with all of our reports up until now, our goal is not to judge the Bees on their facts, but instead, to help them to feel comfortable in sharing what they have learned. The country can be one that they have visited, someone that they know has visited, or a country that is a part of their heritage, or a country that their favorite animal is from. Each Bee brought home a packet about choice and preparation of their World Culture Report this week, and we hope you all enjoy taking time together to choose a country/culture and have a sweet time working on this report with your child.

In all three classes, the teachers are completing our assessments of the students to prepare for the Parent Teacher Conferences in a few weeks. When we return from break, on Wednesday, we will have our Parent Teacher Conference Planning Day, (no school for students on February 28) where all 6 staff members gather around a table in the classroom and spend about 8-10 minutes on each of our 50 students sharing each of our observations of each child. Every year, we jokingly refer to this day as one of our favorite days of the school year as we spend a full 8 hours at the place we love, with the coworkers that we love, discussing the children that we love, and learning all the different perspectives of the children that we love, without the children!

Donna is in Emerald Lake Lodge, in Yoho National Park, just outside of Banff, Canada, and is having the time of her life, enjoying all the festivities surrounding her daughter’s wedding that happens tomorrow. “Thank you to Brook, Emily, Cara, Cari and Brin for covering for me since Wednesday, when I flew out with Samantha and her maid of honor, a teacher from Shanghai. One of the reasons that the wedding is scheduled for this weekend is that 1) Samantha has always wanted to get married in the snow, and 2) her Maid of Honor Julienne, high school and college best friend, has two weeks off for Lunar New Year celebrations!”

We’ve all heard about the theme of this year’s auction and the staff has been having fun finding and sharing our Prom pictures. If you are travelling, or dining out, or having fun doing a favorite family activity, keep the auction in mind – ask for a donation, a certificate, or an item to support our school and to promote their business.

We hope you all have a fabulous mid-winter break, enjoy prepping your gardens and yards for the spring, watch the green buds come up, travel or stay-cate with those that you love, and we look forward to seeing you in the last week of this Leap Year February!