And, just like that, here we are in November. How did that happen? In November, our attention turns to leaves, squirrels, family, gratitude, and celebrations of light. We spend more time indoors for each class, and spend more time bundling up to go outdoors. We have the fireplace on for most of the day, and we love to read stories and share reports. 

The Ladybugs have their special “Stuffy Spend the Night” with Belleamie, and the Crickets and Honeybees prepare for the Harvest Feast. The staff begin to share soup and stew recipes and the fairy garden is covered in autumn leaves. We love this season at The Garden and are excited to enter it with you, our community. 

There is no school next Tuesday in remembrance of Veteran’s Day, and we will have a few Belleamie Big Kid Alumni helpers, as several of our local schools are doing Parent Teacher Conferences and the elementary students have time off.

We had school picture retake day on Thursday with our friend, Nigel, and love that we will have full sets of class pictures for each of our Bugs, Crickets and Bees.

Thank you again for labelling all outerwear and all snack boxes, inner boxes and water bottles. It makes it so much easier for the teachers. We are beginning to see a collection of hoodies, mittens and hats in our Lost and Found. (Top Shelf of our Lending Library) Please check it every so often for misplaced items. 

Read on for Class News.

Ladybugs

Oh, goodness! What a fun week we had in the Ladybug class! We had a pajama day on Tuesday and we celebrated sweet Calvin’s birthday circle! We love that Calvin knows each of his classmate’s names and how he is always the first to check in if someone looks hurt or sad. 

The ladybugs brought in a loved stuffed animal on Tuesday and those stuffies had a wonderful spend the night with Belleamie! You should see the fun that they had! We hope you have a nice time looking at their photo album of their time spent at the school. 

We brought the sensory table into the classroom to have fun exploring with several of our senses, the lovely autumn leaves, acorns and woodland animals. 

Our Peekaboo book this week was “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” booklets, and we had a wonderful time singing lullabies at circle and dancing with our stuffies. 

Hope you have a great weekend and want to remind you that we do not have school next Tuesday in remembrance of Veteran’s Day. 

Crickets

We loved celebrating our friend, Isla’s birthday on Wednesday and Addy’s birthday on Friday! What a lot of November birthdays we have! Both of these girls ‘owned’ the walking around the sun at their circles. We hope the families enjoyed to watch them turn 4 as much as we did!

The Crickets practiced writing their names this week, and did our November calendars. We will continue to write our names at least once a week to develop the skills of recognizing the letters in our name, pencil grip, and getting more comfortable with the formation of the letters. At this time, only a few of our Crickets can write their names independently but the majority of these kiddos follow a yellow brick road. We pretend that the marker is a car and it has to ‘stay on the yellow road’ (trace) to form the letters. As we practice this, we say out loud each letter name and we work on our pencil grip. A fun way to help the kiddos get more comfortable and familiar with their name, is to make name labels for their things:, their bed, their room door, their closet, etc. They will come to know that label spells their name and will become more familiar with it. 

We did a lot of work with our Second Step curriculum this week, reinforcing that ‘no’ or ‘stop’ means STOP! Our puppets modeled this behavior at circle, we played a fun musical freeze dance game, listening for ‘stop’ and then freezing and taking a deep breath, and we read a story about a mouse who is learning how to stop and slow down when his friends are asking him to. 

The Crickets are just getting accustomed to starting the school day inside. We offer some table top activities and the easel painting in the back for the first fifteen minutes of class to allow for all the students to arrive. We are also working with the crickets to grow more independent in putting their own coats and hats on. The kiddos hands are cold, so please send mittens or gloves or hand warmers. Know that the gloves will come home wet and dirty! And the hats and pants and gloves might not always be worn! If there is something that you specifically want them to wear, let us know, otherwise, we let the kids decide what makes them comfortable. The rechargeable handwarmers are awesome and make less trash. Please label everything that you send in.

Honeybees

We practiced our poem of “Whiskey Frisky” about a squirrel in autumn, and received stars for saying it in front of our classmates. We finished our “AT” books and started recognizing how easy it is to read “O” words – “NO” “GO” and “SO”. This lines us up perfectly to be able to “Read” our next poem, “NO-Vember!”  This is a favorite of the staff at The Garden, as the kids really feel that they are reading…

“No Green Grass

No Blue Sky

No Bare feet running by 

No Birds

No Bees

No Leaves on Trees

No Vember”

It is so sweet to watch the Bees use a pointer and point at the sentence chart to actually “Read” the “No” at the beginning of each line.

We had a special circle on Wednesday for our friend, Noble, whose family decided to move on from The Garden. Noble’s parents have worked hard at the all school work parties, and Nikita has led some wonderful parent ed classes. It was very dear to hear Noble’s reactions to his friends’ picture gifts. We are going to miss that boy!

We are beginning to look at patterns in math, using the pattern blocks to make pictures and preparing for our very first report of the year. 

Hope you have a great weekend and a reminder that we do not have school next Tuesday in remembrance of Veteran’s Day.