Happy Happy New Year! We hope you are all still celebrating all that has happened and all that is to come! The students all buzzed, jumped and flew into the classroom with such growth and huge energy (that we all wish we had) to start this year off with a bang! We are excited to spend 2025 with you all at The Garden!

We introduced the kids to the “Quiet Corner” in the classroom, a special place for a student to take some time to chill out or escape the busy-ness of the classroom. The space is filled with sensory items, soft and quiet toys, and has been very popular this first week, so we also have a 5 minute timer. As the novelty wears off, we anticipate the space will be available as needed for each of the kids and there won’t be a ‘line’ waiting to get in! Thank you to all of you for contributing to the classroom holiday gift of items that made this wonderful space possible. We also want to thank our amazing Gibson Ek intern, Aria, for her deep interest and thoughtful ideas and suggestions about this space. What a wonderful community we have here at The Garden!

We truly have seen such growth in the kiddos. Each of them seems to have sprouted up a few inches and showed us major developments in their friendship skills. We were so happy to greet them all after such a long break away. Believe us when we say that however quickly the fall quarter flew by, the winter quarter is over before you know it! With Lunar New Year, Groundhog Day, Valentine’s, Leprechaun Day, Egg Hunt, and Butterfly Tea, being our Garden High Holy Days, along with family traditions of Holi, Easter, Nowruz, Ramadan, and Vaisakhi, that we also celebrate here at The Garden, the almost weekly celebrations really make the months go zoom!

Add to that, the excitement about upcoming graduations, a few weeklong breaks and our Annual Auction, the best night out for parents of the whole school year, and we’ve all got a lot of fun memory making heading our way! We hope you enjoyed the Hobby Horse parade at pick up time to announce our fabulous theme of “Kentucky Derby” for the auction this year! Aren’t those hobby horses adorable? The students picked their horse head from the pile of teachers’ donated socks. Save the date and book your childcare- After about 45 auctions, we have yet to hear of a parent who was disappointed that they attended. For real, it is the most fun parents’ night out of the year!

But…we’re going to try to challenge that title! We hope to see you all at Garden Parents’ Night Out, tomorrow night at Formula Brewery. We have a bunch of tables reserved. Come by for a bit or the whole night! We feel like everyone is ready and in need of a night out away from the kids, to kick off the new year, to kick off the auction, and to catch up and/or meet the other parents of The Garden! The staff will be there and we hope to hang out and have fun with all of you!

Read on for class news:

Ladybugs

No separation anxiety! It was so fun to watch these littlest littles enter the classroom on Tuesday, excited to see their teachers and friends, and to quickly explore the spaces of the classroom that they have not been in for almost three weeks. Typically, this is a day that we see a little hesitancy to re-enter the classroom, after a few weeks of cozying up at home with loved ones. This year’s ladybugs showed no signs of that. We had such a fun day, making our Yankee Doodle Dandy Peekaboo books, dancing with our hobby horses to Yankee Doodle Dandy at circle time, and sharing all our exciting news from the holiday break. The Bugs continued to work on a winter project for our Spring Art Show and had fun reconnecting with friends and teachers.

Crickets

Wow! Such fun energy on Monday morning! We talked about the letter “P”, we introduced our new quiet corner, we read “Three Billy Goats Gruff” and made our Hobby Horses, and we played and played and played. It was so fun to reconnect with our friends and teachers!

On Wednesday, we had lots of fun learning about horses as we practiced our gallops, trots and prances, as well as learning ‘Giddy Up’ and ‘Whoa’! A very fun way to introduce our auction theme of ‘The Kentucky Derby’ this year.

The Crickets love to go into our game cupboard, and get a game going at the front table. These kiddos have so much fun with our “My First Orchard” game. This is a fun game of chance that has all the children playing against a crow. The goal is to get all the fruit in from the orchard before the crow gets to the orchard. They love to beat the ‘stinky crow’. Bingo games and number matching games are also a big hit with this age group. Cara played a game with the kids on the rug where numbers 1-10 were laid out on the rug and each child got a card with little stickers on them. They took turns counting the stickers and then matching their card to the number. As you know, the kids love any activity that has you playing with them!

Honeybees

Oh! My goodness! These Bees are in the homestretch! They ran on to the playground on Monday, excited to meet their old friends, and we love how they run down the brick pathway, just as excited to meet their old friends’ parents! :0) It truly is a village. We love how the little Ladybugs come into The Garden, not knowing that there are other children in the world, to learn how to make a friend and get a best friend in the Cricket class. In the Cricket class, the kids are beyond learning how to share toys, but are learning how to share friends! They spend the Cricket year learning that it is okay for your best friend to play with other kids, and it is okay for you to have more than one friend. In the Bee class, the kids come in, in play groups. There are usually three or four kiddos that like to play together, but thru the fall, those play groups build to girls vs. boys, or backroom players and front room players, or bad guys/ good guys….etc. By January or February, the class is usually divided into two large play groups. At some point, during the Honeybee year, (you may have noticed this already) the Honeybee kids include their classmates’ parents as part of their play group. We notice this in the news, and in the gazebo. The news is not just about their friends, but about their friends’ parents as well. In the Gazebo, the kids come down the brick walkway and address the adults as they do their classmates. “Hey, can you guys come over to play?”  “Hey, do you want to get Starbucks with my mom so that we can play together?” “Hey, do you want to have a sleepover at our house?” Adorable, and we love how it happens every single year.

We kicked off the week with a birthday celebration for Tatum’s half birthday, and then celebrated Ainsley on Wednesday for her half birthday. These two Bees have birthdays in July, and we love celebrating everyone in our Honeybee class.