~ Bulletin Board ~
Last Week for In-house Registration!
Thank you to all our families who have already registered. As new families tour the school it has been very helpful to have an idea of class sizes for next year.
If you have an incoming Ladybug, Cricket or Honeybee for the 2023-2024 school year, please register by January 27.
January in-house priority registration is for current and alum Garden families who would like to hold a spot for their incoming or returning student. The school will open registration to the general public in February based on available spots in each class.
There is a $100 non-refundable registration fee. We will finalize enrollment for all students in March.
Garden Mug Gifts Coming Soon!
Thank you to everyone who gave during Belleamie’s Birthday Celebration at the Garden Mug giving level. We heard from our mug artist, Amy York, who has been busy throwing, firing and glazing each mug by hand. She let us know she’ll be sending our small batch custom mugs in February. We’ll reach out to everyone for pickup or shipping options.
Celebrating Lunar New Year
Gung Hay Fat Choy! We are getting ready to celebrate the Lunar New Year next Monday and Tuesday at The Children’s Garden. We invite all to wear lucky colors, red, magenta, purple, orange, and gold, and we have fun with dragon parades, arts and crafts to ring in the year of the rabbit, and we have fun learning how to use chopsticks to eat ramen noodles and mandarin oranges.
Events, opportunities and resources for our Garden community.
~ Mousehole ~
News, pictures and videos from the classrooms.
Hello Gardeners! Tomorrow’s the day! Can’t wait to see you all at Mirrormont Clubhouse at 1pm for our Auction Kickoff! We are so excited to hear what the fun theme will be and find out a few of the wonderful items that will be up for auction! We are looking forward to seeing all of you at this fun event and the kickoff to our most important fundraiser of the year.
We had a great 4-day week at The Garden, with no school Monday, honoring Martin Luther King Jr. With our older kiddos, the Crickets and the Bees, we spoke about having dreams to make the world a better place, and about Martin’s dream of having all people being treated equally.
On Tuesday night, we had our first Board Meeting of 2023. We are so appreciative of our Board of Trustees, a group that is made up of Current and Alum parents. Our Board meets with the staff once a month for our formal board meetings, and then smaller committees hold meetings regularly and report our committee work to the Board. If you have any interest in the work of the Board, questions, comments, or concerns, or are interested in hearing more about the smaller committees, please talk to a staff member or one of the Trustees for more information.
Gung Hay Fat Choy! We are getting ready to celebrate the Lunar New Year next Monday and Tuesday at The Children’s Garden. We invite all to wear lucky colors, red, magenta, purple, orange, and gold, and we have fun with dragon parades, arts and crafts to ring in the year of the rabbit, and we have fun learning how to use chopsticks to eat ramen noodles and mandarin oranges. Lots of memories are made at this celebration – Monday is the date for Bees and Crickets and Tuesday, we will celebrate the Lunar New Year in the Ladybug class.
Read on for Class News:
Ladybugs
Oh! What a full class! Every single Ladybug was present on Tuesday. That’s the first time since before Halloween! It was fun to see everyone so happy to greet each other!
The Bugs put some finishing touches on their Snowman art pieces and had fun dancing and singing at circle time. The teachers are really pleased with hearing our Ladybugs sing the closing circle song. They have grown so much since our first day of school waaaaay back in September!
We started learning a new nursery rhyme and made some fun dragon masks, getting ready for our Lunar New Year celebration next Tuesday. The Bugs are invited to wear lucky colors on Tuesday, red, magenta, purple, orange, and gold.
Crickets
Wow! What a fun time we had with these Crickets for just two days this week! We had a fun sound basket for “P” from our friend, Eddy, and we acted out “Chicken Little” to continue our focus on that folk tale. Ask your Cricket if they were an actor or an audience member.
Celebrating MLK day was a great opportunity to begin talking to our Crickets about dreams that they have, to help make the world a better place, and we also continued exploring books and stories with themes about treating people differently based on how they look. This week, we read Dr. Seuss’ ‘The Sneetches’, and the children LOVED commenting on the story, “No one is better, just because they have a star!” “They are just wasting their money!” “They look the same, just some don’t have a star!”
We had a rainy and cold Wednesday on the playground, but once we got inside, we had fun making dragon hats for our Lunar New Year celebration, next Monday in class. The Crickets are invited to wear lucky colors on Monday, red, magenta, purple, orange, and gold. Weather permitting, we hope to have a dragon parade at the end of class on Monday.
Honeybees
The Bees had a short week, but it sure seemed like we got two weeks of curriculum done! We had every single Bee in attendance on Tuesday, and we celebrated Ida’s birthday on Thursday.
We had a great sound basket brought in by Penelope, and we started to get ready for our Lunar New Year celebration. Next Monday, the Bees are invited to wear lucky colors, red, magenta, purple, orange and/or gold. We are celebrating the Year of the Rabbit and decorating beautiful dragon masks and tails for a dragon parade at pick up time. We will also have fun using chopsticks at snack time, even trying chopsticks on ramen noodles and mandarin oranges.
The Honeybees are having fun and developing their skills at giving reports. Last week, we did reports on our Hive mates, and this week, we started doing reports on community helpers. Eowyn was our first and did a great job telling us why a garbage collector is a community helper.
We celebrated Ida’s 5th trip around the sun on Thursday. Oh, how wonderful it must be to be the center of our classmates’ attention at our birthday circle! To hear the sweet words from each of our friends, telling us that we are amazing, loved and appreciated. The best!
Lots of our Bees received a star for the recitation of “Hold Fast to Dreams” by Langston Hughes. We love hearing our students recite this poem. Please help them practice their poems over the weekend. They get a new poem each Thursday. We hope that all our Gardeners hold fast to their dreams!
Next week we celebrate Arlo and Foster at their birthday circles, and we hope to have a dragon parade, weather permitting, after our Lunar New Year Celebration on Monday. The Honeybees are invited to wear lucky colors on Monday, red, magenta, purple, orange, and gold.
Have a great weekend everyone! See you Saturday at Mirrormont at 1pm!
Ladybugs
Crickets
Honeybees
~ Gratitude Corner ~
We love our community and are so grateful and humbled by the support and love you so generously give! Thank you!
Sometimes it’s the little things! Our classes have been bustling this week. We’d had fully attending classes for the first time in a long while. We are so grateful to our families who’ve worked diligently to help our community stay healthy during a hard cold and flu season. Our attendance is up with more and more of our students are feeling healthy!
~ Office Notes~
Honeybee
Parent Teacher Conferences
Monday
March 20 During Class via Zoom
(No school for Honeybees this day)
Ladybug
Parent Teacher Conferences
Tuesday
March 21 During Class via Zoom
(No school for Ladybugs this day)
Cricket
Parent Teacher Conferences
Wednesday
March 22 During Class via Zoom
(No school for Crickets this day)
~ Upcoming Events~
Please mark your calendar with these important dates.
Month at a glance
January
January 16- No School for students in observation on Martin Luther King Jr. Day
January 21 – Auction Kickoff Party
January 23 – Lunar New Year Celebration Crickets and Honeybees
January 24 – Lunar New Year Celebration Ladybugs
January 27 – In-house priority registration due
February
February 20-24 Second Winter Break. No School for students
March
March 1 – Conference Planning. No School for Students
March 20 – Honeybee Conferences during class time. No School for Honeybees
March 21 – Ladybug Conferences during class time. No School for Ladybugs
March 22 – Cricket Conferences during class time. No school for Crickets
Daily Class Schedule
Ladybugs
Tuesday and Thursday 8:15 – 10:45 am
Crickets
Monday, Wednesday and Friday 8:15 – 11:15 am
Honeybees
Monday-Thursday 12:15 – 3:15 pm
~ Quick Links~
Quick access to informative Garden pages.
Health and Wellness
What are the protocols for a stuffy nose?
Please view our Health and Wellness page for our health safety practices and protocols for the 2022-2023 school year.
Curriculum
Explore our Curriculum page for the foundational elements of our programming to see how we integrate social skills, literacy and math readiness, science, cultural enrichment, and the creative arts in an emergent, play-based environment in our unique natural setting.
Closure and Inclement Weather
With winter weather upon us, you can view our Closure and Inclement Weather page for policy information and pick up a hard copy from the bulletin board.
While we monitor conditions at the school, please note our families live across a broad geographical area and conditions in your neighborhood or on your route to/from school may differ from that at The Children’s Garden. If you are concerned that it is not safe for you or your child to be on the road, please do not hesitate to stay home.
