What a fun week we’ve had here at The Garden! 

Keep dressing your kiddos in layers, labelled, and help them keep their hands and toes warm. Click the link here for information about clothing items that our families have recommended, and check out the recommendations for rechargeable hand warmers.

Brin has started creating our “Village Gifts”. It’s hard to believe that we are already talking about our memorable
Winter Celebration Event. December 8^th! Mark it on your calendar now. Such a memorable event every year! 

Ladybugs
We had fun this week finishing our first art show project of a beautiful autumnal tree. We started talking about things that we are thankful for and made some handprint turkeys! Next week, we will begin to learn our dance that we will be performing at the Winter Celebration on December 8th at Issaquah Middle School. Our Bugs are really starting to chat with each other and use their names.

Crickets
We finished our Art Show project. On Wednesday, we started talking about our “Body Rights Curriculum”. We read a story called “Don’t Hug Doug”, a little boy who is friendly, but doesn’t like hugs. We talked about alternatives, high fives, fist bumps, hand shakes, etc., that we can greet people with instead of hugs. We should always ask someone if we can hug them, and if the answer is no, we know that this doesn’t mean that they don’t like us. This week, we started using “Cricket Comrades”. We pair the children up for a week at a time and they do some fun activities with that partner and sit with them at snack. For our shyer kids, this is sometimes a boost to begin a new friendship with someone that they might otherwise be struggling with figuring out how to invite themselves to play. One of our first activities that we did was practice some different ‘high fives’, and then we painted some pattern snakes. We are working on making our placemats for next week’s Harvest Feast, and painted some beautiful paintings at the easel! We talked about what we are thankful for, and we are indeed thankful for our Veterans whom we honor on Friday for Veteran’s Day.

Honeybees
We have had such an amazing week with these Bees! We learned a new word, “No” and then read it repeatedly as we recited our poem “November”. On Tuesday, we had alum mom, Joy Lewis, come into class to teach us all about how to vote and how to make our voices heard. We held a fun vote on which poem to learn next and, drumroll…..,Whiskey Frisky Squirrel is the winner! We had a few big kid helpers this week and started working with our pattern blocks to make some turkeys and patterned borders for our Harvest Feast placemats. Emily took the Bees up to Luna’s Forest in groups to search for and observe the colorful fungi. Our theme for these next few weeks is Gratitude and we are having a circle each day where we each say what we are thankful for and then ask our circle neighbor what they are thankful for.

Next week, along with our focus on gratitude and our Harvest Feast for our older students, we begin learning our dances for our beloved Winter Celebration.

Have a wonderful weekend, Garden Friends!