We hope you all had a wonderful Mother’s Day weekend, filled with love and family and fun! We have less than 4 weeks of school left for the 2024-2025 school year. How can that be possible?! Bees have 14 classes remaining, Crickets have 10, and Ladybugs have 7. Whew!

We are working on helping our students through the transitions that are ahead of them, and are available to help any of our families that might also have questions about maneuvering through the same transitions. It is indeed a moment in time, and we understand how huge it all seems.

Ladybugs –

We are sad to say goodbye to Alaid and her family, Jeff and Kristin, as they have a wonderful opportunity to locate close to family in Colorado. We are excited for their opportunity, but are so going to miss this sweet family. Thank you so much to Jeff and Kristin for all the support that you have given to our program and please stop by and visit us whenever you are in town. You will always be a part of our Garden Community.

We had fun this week making Peek A Boo booklets about “This Little Piggy”. We also read a fun picture book called “Piggies” by Audrey Wood, and we painted our little toe ‘piggies’ for a special surprise that you will receive in a few weeks.

Speaking of a few weeks, we only have 4 left, or 7 class days! Can you believe it? It feels like it was just yesterday that our sweet little Bugs were saying goodbye to you all for the first time, and we were sending you pictures of how happy your child was, once they settled into their first few minutes of Ladybug class.

Crickets –

The Crickets had such a fun week, turning our focus to dads, so that we make sure they are celebrated as much as our moms, and we also started learning about insects! As our Crickets quickly turn into Honeybees, we are enjoying learning about the attributes of insects. We read books about crickets, ladybugs and honeybees, and we continued looking at “Three Little Pigs” We learned a fun song, sung to the tune of “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes”, about insects, titled, “Head, Thorax, Abdomen, and six legs!”.

We celebrated Oliver and Eleanor’s 4th birthday on Wednesday! How fun! What a fun celebration to mark Sasha and Ethan’s parenthood anniversary!

Honeybees –

What a fun week, learning more about insects, especially ladybugs, crickets and honeybees, and turning our attention to Dads and Grandpas, to make sure that we honor them before our school year is over. We headed up to the forest on Thursday for our outdoor play time, and we had Eddy join us at closing circle on Wednesday to answer questions about what Kindergarten is like. As our Bees are moving on to a different school in the fall for Kindergarten, we would love to know what their school mascot is going to be? We know Clark has its’ sharks, but what are Maple Hills students called? What about our home schoolers? What would your kids like their homeschool mascot to be? Let us know. We will be asking the Honeybees in the next few sessions.

We had fun celebrating our friend Rumi’s 5th trip around the sun, and we also learned a fun song about insects, to the tune of “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes”, called “Head, Thorax, Abdomen, and Six Legs!”

We made another ‘flip book’ based on the ending of “OX” and added an ‘F’ and a ‘B’ and an ‘L’ to show rhyming words, and to recognize letters and letter sounds as we continue to learn to read and sound out simple consonant, vowel, consonant words.