November 1, 2024

Bulletin Board

Events, opportunities and resources for our Garden community.

Belleamie Thank You G

We’re (almost) speechless!

THANK YOU!

We are overjoyed to share that through the generosity of all of you, we raised $18,651! It’s so amazing to witness our community come together in support of our special little school. We truly couldn’t do it without you. 

In addition to our generous current families, this year’s Belleamie’s Birthday Gifts fundraiser saw a record number of alumni donors. It has been so fun to read little nostalgic notes from former Garden families.

 We are so grateful for our community!

Love,

The Children’s Garden

Picture RETAKE Day Gazette

Our long-time photographer friend Nigel Cooper sent out Image Gallery emails to everyone who ordered pictures. 

If your child was not here on Picture Day or if you’d like to retake their picture join us:

Monday, November 4
10:45am-12:30pm

You are welcome to stop in anytime during his Picture Retake time.

Ladybug Stuffy Spend the Night

On Tuesday, November 5th, we invite the Ladybugs to come to school in their pajamas and to bring a special stuffy. It is very important that this is not their number 1 stuffy that they need to sleep with at night, as the stuffy is going to have a ‘spend the night’ at The Garden with Belleamie!

Visit our  Ladybug Stuffy Spend the Night page for all the details!

We did it!

WOW-we have exceeded our goal with a whopping 13.5 lbs of recycled plastic! 

We are inspired by our turnout and will continue taking hard to recycle items by forming a Green Team and adding the Ridwell service to our school.

If you are interested in being part of our Green Team, please let us know.

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Civic Engagement

We at The Garden take civic engagement seriously. (It is part of our mission) Please visit the office and check out our wonderful collection of children’s books on this topic to start your conversations about the importance of participating in elections with your child today!

  • A few ideas of how to engage your children around the elections:
    Show your child your ballot/let them watch you fill it out
  • Talk about your family’s core values and how they guide your decisions
  • Talk about your decisions on who/what you are voting for and why
  • Let your child drop your ballot off in the mail or go on a special trip to the ballot drop box!

Send in a photo of you and your child voting to share in the Gazette!

Parent Education Surve;y

We’re all ears and can’t wait
to hear your thoughts.

We would love to hear your thoughts and feedback on what areas of parent education you and your family would benefit from in order to plan our year!

– The Children’s Garden School Parent Education Committee

The Mousehole

Hello! Happy November! A reminder to turn our clocks back one hour this weekend. As we enter the dark and shorter days of the year, the people around the earth have many ways to celebrate and focus on light. Wishing you a Diwali filled with endless joy, warmth, and light. Feliz dia de los Muertos! To those remembering the deceased and celebrating their memory, we wish you a joyful time, and Happy November, as we cozy up, celebrate the harvest and keep in mind all those many wonderful things we have to be grateful for.

We had another wonderful week at The Garden, with lots of Halloween fun sandwiched in the middle. Thank you again to the Carpinito Family for the sweet little pumpkins to decorate.
Have a wonderful weekend and don’t forget to vote! We’d love to see photos of you and your children mailing your ballot. Send a photo or two to The Children’s Garden.

Read on for Class News:

Ladybugs
We had a great week in the Ladybug class. We worked on Tuesday on making “Jack O Lantern” Monoprints, when we painted the back of a cake tin orange, making a face on the cake tin with a q-tip and then pressing a sheet of paper to the cake tin and lifting off a ‘monoprint’ of their very own Jack-O-Lantern! Check them out as they decorate the deck of our classroom!

We enjoyed making our clothespin spiders and then using them at circle time to act out “Little Miss Muffet” and “There’s a Spider on the Floor”.
On Thursday we adored our cutest Bugs ever in their Halloween costumes!

We tried to get apple rings off of a string that was hanging from a witch’s broom, without using their hands! So fun!

Next week, we are introducing a brand new ‘special event’, just for Ladybugs! Belleamie is inviting stuffed animals to spend the night with her at school! Next Tuesday will be pajama day for the Ladybugs. Our teachers and students will come to school in pajamas and bring our SECOND FAVORITE stuffed animal friend to school. We will enjoy lots of fun activities with our stuffed animals and then tuck them into their little beds before we sing our closing circle song. On Thursday, we will return to class to reunite with our friends, and hear all about their special time with Belleamie. We love our special days and wonderful events throughout the school year. We are excited to make new memories with this new special event for the Ladybugs.

Crickets
We had a wonderful week in the Cricket class and a fun Halloween celebration on Wednesday! Isn’t this a fun age to celebrate holidays with? The Crickets really go ‘all in’ on any fun event! What a fun day we had watching our cute little Crickets parading into the classroom in their costumes, painting their faces either spooky or beautiful and trying to get an apple ring off of a witch’s brook without using our hands! We decorated our sweet little Carpinito pumpkins to bring home and made some spooky spiders with lots of googly eyes!

After we read a fun story, “Go Away Big Green Monster”, by Ed Emberly, we started talking to the Crickets about using our big voice to stand up and say “Go Away!” “You don’t scare me!” We made our stamper books full of spooky Halloween symbols and the children annotated their stories by telling each symbol to go away, “You don’t scare me!” It was so fun to witness our Crickets grow braver with each turn of the page.

We celebrated Max’s birthday on Wednesday and Presley’s birthday on Friday! We sure love celebrating our Crickets’ fourth trip around the sun at birthday circle.

Honeybees
Another full and fun week in the Honeybee class: This week was a great example of what wonderful substitute teachers we have in our community. The staff had appointments, and other commitments and Matt helped us out as well as Elyse, Rylie’s mum. Several of our parents offered to help and we so appreciate it! Not only are you such a dear resource for our staff, but your children sure enjoy sharing their time at school with you. Thank you.

On Monday, we had our friend and alum Mom, Joy Lewis, join us in the Honeybee class to lead a circle about being a good citizen, what an election is and how to vote. The class took a vote to decide if we would go up in the forest to play or play on the playground on Tuesday. The playground won! It is interesting to see how this vote goes each year. Thank you Joy for helping us develop good citizenry in our Gardeners.

We continued to learn about adding different letters to “O” to make “No, So and Go”. This was a wonderful introduction to our November poem:

No green grass
No blue sky
No bare feet running by
No bees
No leaves on trees
November.

We love this poem in the Honeybees class as it totally empowers the children as they ‘read’ the poem with the pointer in class in front of their peers. Next week, we will begin writing our “I am grateful for….” sentences.

Our Halloween celebration on Thursday was as fun as expected with this group! We had fun painting pumpkins, painting our faces and parading around in our adorable costumes.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Halloween

Ladybugs

Crickets

Honeybees

Gratitude Corner

Thank you so much for opening your hearts and your pocketbooks to support our Belleamie’s Birthday Gifts Fundraiser! We surpassed our goal and had so much fun celebrating our 47-year-old mouse who always asks us how we are feeling. Thank you so much! With your support, we are able to keep this program going – hopefully for at least, another 47 years!

Thank you to Honeybee Korzen’s mom, Jazz Walton, for sharing her passion for sustainability and launching our successful plastic recycling drive. You saw Jazz’s presentation at Curriculum Days and may have seen her working hard behind the scenes to sort, weigh and load all of our recycled items. We appreciate you Jazz for inspiring change in how we see, use and reuse items that might have gone into the trash without another thought. We are excited to build upon what you started and continue to demonstrate to our students how we add action to our Opening Circle Poem, “We Light this Candle to remind ourselves…To take good care of the earth, Because it is our home…”

Thank you to Joy Lewis for coming into our Honeybee class this past Monday to teach us about being a citizen, how to vote and what an election is all about. Joy is an alum parent who has been coming to our class for the past 3 years before Election Day and we so value her contributions to our Civics education. We have a wonderful selection of preschool age appropriate books about being a citizen, voting and elections in the office. Check them out, and don’t forget to vote! Send us a photo of you and your child with your ballot!

If any of you have an interest or a skill (cooking, music, science, craft, holiday tradition, celebration) that you would like to share with our students, please let us know! You, too, could be an iconic part of our curriculum, like Larry the Fish Man!

Special Note

Share your family traditions and holidays!

We all have lovely traditions and special days that we celebrate in our own homes and families. 

Do you have a holiday or tradition you celebrate that you’d like to share in the classroom? The staff would love to invite parents to join their student’s class and bring a story to read, tell us a little bit about how you celebrate the holiday, and maybe bring a yummy treat or craft that you typically eat or do at that time. We also invite anyone who would like to research with their student, a holiday that they want to learn more about and ‘present’ what they learned at circle around that holiday. 

Book shelf, wagon appreciations

Office Notes

News and reminders from the office.

Ladybugs

Crickets

Honeybees

Calendar

Please mark your calendar with these important dates.

November

  • November 4: Picture Retake Day
  • November 11: Veteran’s Day Observance-No School
  • November 21: Honeybee Harvest Feast
  • November 22: Cricket Harvest Feast
  • November 27—29: Thanksgiving Holiday

December

  • December 6: Winter Celebration
  • December 23—January 3: First Winter Break
Winter Celebration Gazette

Save the Date!

Winter Celebration
Friday, December 6
6:30-7:30 pm

Issaquah Middle School

Gazebo

Daily Class Schedule

Ladybugs
Tuesday and Thursday  8:15 – 10:45 am

Crickets
Monday, Wednesday and Friday 8:15 – 11:15 am

Honeybees
Monday-Thursday 12:15 – 3:15 pm

~ Poems~

Sunshine

School Poems

Part of our daily routine at The Garden is singing or saying a few of our traditional poems.

Find a printable version to our Closing Circle Song, and the poem “We Light This Candle” at the following links.