Garden Gazette January 6, 2023

News, pictures and videos from the classrooms.

Hello! Happy Friday and Happy New Year! It feels great to be back on the keys after the break! Thanks as always for reading – we are grateful that you spend your Friday afternoons with us. 

What a wonderfully long and rich holiday break that we had! The teachers are campaigning for Christmas and New Year to always occur on a Sunday! It seemed perfect for us – a week before Christmas, a week between and that simply extra day on Monday…we were all well rested, refreshed, and excited to see our students again! We hope you all had a wonderful two weeks, filled with warmth, health, and love. Cari, Brin and Cara were happy to have their children home for the holidays, (though Cara spent 5 days isolated from her family with Covid), Brook had a wonderful time reuniting the kids and herself with Mick and watching him star in his Cirque Du Soleil show in Malta, Emily adopted a wonderful 2 year old pup named “Ravioli”, and Donna had a lovely, mellow Christmas celebrating exciting family accomplishments/milestones,  in person and on zoom!   

We are all back! Refreshed! Healthy, and Happy to see the amazing growth in all of our students! Every year we are amazed at how much physical and social growth the children have made. This year is no different – height, lost teeth, lack of separation anxiety, and independence! We love it!

With the Winter Celebration behind us – (again, wasn’t it so fun?!) – our focus turns to fun classroom celebrations, Opposite Day, Black and White Day, Groundhog Day, Lunar New Year and ! If you have family traditions around this time of year, we would love to chat with you about sharing them with our students. We also ask if any of our parents or grandparents have an interest in visiting our classroom with a science experiment, art project, musical instrument, cooking or baking class…you name it! We would love to have you! Please talk to a staff member so that we can schedule something.

Our other exciting January activity is the very fun “Kick off” to our Annual Auction! Find out the theme! Get to know the other families on your Auction Team! Get all the deets on what you need to do and the opportunities that are out there for you to participate! January 21^st at 1 PM! We can’t wait to enjoy this fun afternoon with you all.

Ladybugs   

What a wonderful first day of 2023 we had! 14 of our 16 Ladybug friends walked into our classroom comfortably and confidently. Several of them knew their classmates’ names and got right down to the business of play. We did news and reacquainted ourselves with the daily routine. Every single Ladybug sat nicely at circle, danced with a friend, and shared with us their fun memories of the break.

We learned “Wee Willie Winkie” and took turns acting it out. We painted some beautiful snowy scenes that we will add some details to next week for a sweet little Art Show project. We opened up a wonderful holiday gift from our Ladybug families, an adorable Ladybug tea set! We can’t wait to set up a tea party at the table next week! Thank you so much – we love it!

Crickets

The Crickets had a great couple of days this week. On Wednesday, we opened some fun Holiday gifts that were waiting for us! We opened a big box of dishes and pots and pans for our mud kitchen on the playground! We opened a lovely daily calendar for our circle discussions and Ada’s grandparents in Italy sent us a lovely book of stories for us to share with the children. In their words “A Snuggle for all of the children at The Children’s Garden”. How sweet! Thank you to all! The teachers were very busy being chefs in the mud kitchen, filling orders on our new dishes for coffee, hot cocoa, stone soup and corn bread!

We had a wonderful sound basket for the letter “N”, and read a delightful story about “Elmer”, an elephant who is multi colored and wanted to look the same as all of the other ‘elephant colored’ elephants. We started working on a fun art project inspired by Elmer, for our Spring Art Show. If you are interested in getting a sneak peek at our Art Show projects, sign up to help us mat and frame all of our amazing pieces! We will send you with all of the materials needed, along with a sample of a finished project. Let us know!

Honeybees

Tuesday was such a fun first day back for our Honeybees. Can you believe there are only a few months left of their time at preschool? The teachers are very aware, and so loving our time with these kiddos.

We celebrated Hudson’s 5^th trip around the sun, and talked about the new year, new month, and our classroom calendar. In January each school year, we look at where our group of students are at with their Kindergarten readiness skills. We are working with our Bees on finessing their name writing and letter recognition, and we will start our arithmetic games in the coming sessions. We add to our star words each week and begin to write sentences, understanding the formation of sentences and spacing between words, along with punctuation. Don’t be surprised to hear your children say phrases with exclamation points, question marks or periods.

On Wednesday, we had a full class of 21 students! First time since early October! We had a lovely visit from Teacher Matt, who ran a lot of the kids’ energy off on the playground, before we came in to enjoy two stories at circle. Emily read a favorite book of Penelope’s about Crayons coming home after being forgotten on many travels, and Matt read a favorite book of Nathaniel’s about a tortoise who could not get to sleep because of a very noisy Winter’s nap!

A lot of the Bees got a star for the “Months of the Year” poem/song. This is a hard one, and we are so impressed with how many kids know it already. We’ve started the daily practice of looking at the calendar and saying the date in a full sentence. “Today is Friday, January 6, 2023.” We also take on the role of meteorologists and have a student report the weather each day. “Today is cloudy and mild.” These kids are growing by leaps and bounds, and 2023 is off to a great start!

Have a great weekend!