What another fun week we had at The Children’s Garden! The frigid cold temperatures kept the students in motion on the playground to help them warm up, and thus, we hope, used up a lot of energy! 

We had a wonderful Open House last week, with almost 30 families attending! We know several of those families came by way of referral from current families, so thank you!

On Monday, with the Issaquah Elementary Schools doing Parent Teacher Conferences, we had a few alum siblings join us as Belleamie’s Big Kid Helpers. Speaking of conferences, our conference schedule is up on the Brightwheel App, so make sure to sign up for a zoom conference for a time that works for you. 

Tuesday evening, we had a Workshop hosted by Honeybee Mom, Ema Virdi and Donna’s husband, John Misner, to offer guidance and ideas to help you prepare for the future of your children and families. There was a nice turnout and we hope you found the session and information helpful. If you were unable to attend, but are interested in the information given, Brin has some extra hard copies available in the office. 

Tomorrow night is our Parents’ Night Out! Last year, we had such an amazing turnout, and it was so fun to see old friends gathering with brand new friends, and all building community. Remembering when you guys came to Open House and New Parents’ Luncheon, we know how important ‘building community’ is for all of you. We hope you take the step to join us. The staff will be there and we look forward to collectively ‘letting our hair down’, at this adults only event. 

We loved asking all three classes about the big Football game last weekend in their classroom news, and we hope you get as big a kick out of their responses as we did. 

Hope to see you all tomorrow night!

Ladybugs

Wasn’t that a wonderful drive by last week to Emery’s house? Thank you to those that joined us and thank you to Shea for creating such a wonderful memory book for Emery to have forever! Beautiful and heartwarming, all of it! There wasn’t a dry eye in the staff car! 

This week, we celebrated Cyrus turning 3, and had a wonderful time building with blocks. The teachers of The Children’s Garden strongly suggest reading books to your children often, and having a great set of wooden blocks to play with. They are great for balance, construction, creativity, imagination, and they feel smooth and good in the hands, they are wonderful cooperative play toys and lots of just good fun! 

We asked the Bugs about the Seahawks game, but of the three classes, they really were the least aware of the excitement that overtook most of our local families. :0)  We are buoyed by the fact their focus is on finding fun things to play and fun people to play with. We are watching the Bugs mature in real time. There are more students using their classmates’ names, random hugs to classmates and teachers, using lovely manners, and greeting us all with warm smiles. It’s lovely to see. We hope to see a lot of you tomorrow night at the Parents’ Night Out! We’d love to get to know you all better!

Information about our Valentine’s Day celebration went home this week, as well as some dates in February to mark off on your calendars. Valentine’s Day is also a pajama day, so there is lots to look forward to!  

Next week, we begin our color studies and we start off with RED! The children are invited to wear red for both days and bring red snacks. Of course, any color will be celebrated! We will be going through the colors of the rainbow over the next month and a half. 

Thank you to all of you! The Ladybug class is completely signed up in the Brightwheel app for upcoming Parent Teacher Conferences.  

Crickets

The Crickets started off the week with a fun continuation of our Henny Penny/Chicken Little story study. We read our final version on Monday and started acting out the story and made our little stamper books based on the story. We hope you take a moment to have your child “read” their story to you at home. Their words might not match the words that they dictated to us, but that’s okay, it’s their story!

We also learned the nursery rhyme, 1,2 Buckle my Shoe, and made little peek a boo books based on that rhyme. We love this nursery rhyme because they are adorable as they stand up and do a solo presentation of the rhyme. We often have a child end the rhyme with “A Big Fat Chicken!”

We had a wonderful sound basket from Rhett for the letter “R”, and we continued to work on our Penguin Art Show project. 

Several of the Crickets are having cold hands at outside time, and are frustrated with the ‘shaker’ hand warmers. We suggest the rechargeable hand warmers from Amazon, and find the Ocoopa brand is pretty dependable, among others. A few parents have purchased little rechargeable ones that come with two, and those are great as well, but even one is enough to warm them up. Gloves or mittens are also great. The school has a few loaner mittens, but not enough for the whole class. Set ‘em up for success! 

Our Cricket friend, Lukas, has a birthday this week, but we are waiting to celebrate it in a few weeks so that Mom and Dad can be present for Birthday Circle! We are excited to celebrate our friend Lukas turning 4! 

Our Parent Teacher conferences are coming up in March and the conference schedule sign up went up on the Brightwheel App this week. Make sure you sign up. We will be doing assessments and staff conference planning throughout February. 

Hope to see you at the Parents’ Night out, tomorrow night! The staff is looking forward to it! 

Honeybees

The Bees started the week off with a cold outside playtime, and had lots of news about the Seahawks game! We started a new series, a favorite of our social emotional curriculum, called “Wee Thinkers”. There are 8 books in this series and it introduces the brain and the heart as the center of thinking and feeling, and also introduces the idea of the ‘group plan’. 

We are finishing up our family unit, with graphing and drawing pictures of our family, we worked on getting a star for our ‘Families’ poem, and had a fun ‘graphing’ activity, in which we made hash marks for how many children, adults and pets are in each family, and then we transferred the hash marks to a “unifix” cubes and made a comparison of family sizes. It was really cool to watch their eyes follow the comparison and watch their ‘light bulbs’ go on as they caught on to how the information was transformed from questions to hash tags to physical items. 

We are now moving on to begin looking at animal families. – different habitats, different characteristics, and animals in winter, etc. 

This weekend, our poem is The Groundhog, as we prepare to celebrate Groundhog Day on Monday! This is an especially fun holiday that we celebrate at The Children’s Garden! You will be greeted after class on Monday by some adorable Groundhogs that the students make. 

We worked some more on our own written stories, and hope to have them finished and illustrated in time for our Parent Teacher Conferences in March. The schedule sign up for those conferences went out this week on the Brightwheel App. Make sure that you reserve your spot. We can’t wait to talk to you about how much your student has learned this year!