Tonight is Homecoming! The staff love this event because we get to catch up with alumni parents and brand new Garden parents and party all night with all of them! We all break out our Garden Gear (Have you got yours yet?) and come out in full force to show our support for this wonderful school! We have a few Garden Grads joining us tonight, those alumni students that are graduating from High School this year! It’s always amazing to all of us to hear what they are planning for their future and also, how quickly they went from Honeybees to High School Seniors!!! We hope to see you all there tonight! 

Can you believe that it is already October?! We keep saying how quickly the year flies by, and we are taken aback by the swiftness as well. The Honeybees spent their first full week in the Forest and we are all preparing for curriculum coffee talks and zoom check ins. Check the schedule on the calendar and sign up for your zoom check in as soon as you can so that the teachers can begin to plan accordingly. 

The Crickets and Bees have been learning about Salmon this week and are getting ready for our alumni Dad, “Larry the Fish Man” to visit our classes next week to share some real salmon from the hatchery to show us the eggs and milt, and the size of these amazing fish! The two fish that Larry usually brings are taller than a lot of our students! Larry is a F.I.S.H. docent at the Hatchery and we are all excited to see him next week.

We’ve had all three classes host a meeting in the Movement Room, and we sure appreciate everyone that has volunteered for our program or signed up to volunteer or work on a committee for us in the future. You guys are awesome. We are already beside ourselves with gratitude for all that you all have done already. Thank you so much! We have so many amazing projects and ideas and needs going forward for the next 50 years of The Children’s Garden! Expanding our inclusivity mission, strategic planting and landscaping, Professional Development to learn new skills and bring us up to date with our current curriculum, New Playground Equipment, General Repairs and Upgrades to our structures… Of course, one of the things that we need for all of these projects is money! Our fundraising committee is looking for community members to step up and share your ideas, share your skills, help us set up and put on events, or help us with decorations!  Find local businesses that are interested in advertising or procuring to the school, sponsoring events…please talk to a staff member or your room parent if you would like to join our committee to help us bring our visions to life!

This weekend is Issaquah’s World Famous Salmon Days Festival! Check out the salmon this week at the Festival, and keep your eyes open for your Garden staff, as we all love our Salmon Days and seeing our Garden families brightens our Festival visit that much more! 

Read on for Class news. 

Ladybugs

Wow! It’s as if these Ladybugs have been here for so much longer! They are really learning the daily routine and most of them are having fun sitting at circle and learning and singing and dancing to Garden favorite songs. The Ladybugs made their first ‘peek-a-boo’ booklet at school this week.

Our Peek-a-Boo books are a fun and classic Garden Ladybug activity. The students practice their cutting skills, they get to use a ‘hole punch’ machine to help us make the book, and they love to play ‘peek-a-boo’ looking through the booklet to find the teacher. The booklets are illustrated works of our daily routine, our circle songs and nursery rhymes. We encourage our Ladybug parents to have your child ‘read’ their booklets to you. It could be a fun bed time routine. You could read through it once, and then they can read it back to you. This is a wonderful first stage of literacy, learning to hold the booklet properly, turn the pages to read a different phrase, follow the pictures to keep up with the story, etc. We will talk more about the peek-a-boo booklets and other fundamentals of our Ladybug curriculum at the Curriculum Coffee Talk on October 8th , right after drop-off in the Movement Room. We hope you can make it and take the opportunity to learn about our Play Based and Social Emotional curriculum that we use to start these kiddos off on their amazing Educational Journey. 

Crickets

The Crickets had a ball learning about the letter “C” and drove really sparkly new hot wheel cars along the letter “C” roads and said “C makes the sound ‘C’, like “Car”. We had so many fun sharing items for our “C” show and tell on Monday, as well as celebrating Michael’s 4th trip around the sun! 

It is hard to believe that these kiddos have not been Crickets for longer than a few weeks. They are showing such great social emotional skills of friendship making and checking in on their classmates that look like they are dealing with some emotions, and so excited to sit at circle and learn new things! 

The weather is changing and these kiddos have been chilly on the playground after drop off. Please remember to send them with mittens, both labelled with their name, warm layers and comfy shoes to ‘run around’ so that they can keep warm. 

We LOVE our forest Fridays! It is so fun to watch our kiddos learn how to stand in line, take turns to go on the big tree swing, and report and line up for a hike. They are all doing so great! It was fun to watch them learning to care for the little critters that we find in Luna’s Forest – from spiders to slugs, caterpillars to ants. We learned that we are in their home, so the critters get to be safe. Our museum table in the center of the tree circle became a race course for slugs, to a runway for our slug fashions that we made from google eyes and beads found on the forest floor leftover from summer camp. 

We started learning about salmon in the Cricket class, getting ready for Salmon Days and our visit from Larry ‘the fish man’ next week. Larry is a F.I.S.H. docent at the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery, and a Garden Alum Dad, who visits our campus every year, bringing with him a real salmon or two to show us these amazing fish up close. We made salmon ‘peek a boo’ books, learned a new song about Salmon, describing their appearance, and learned about the life cycle of the salmon as well as acting it out ourselves! 

Honeybees

This was our first Forest Week in the Honeybee class! How fun to spend the whole week up in Luna’s Forest! It was great fun for our teachers to take it all outside and to get down and dirty with our little 5 year olds. 

We started to learn about our Issaquah celebrity, Salmon! We played 20 questions to learn what we are going to be learning about this unit, and these kiddos were so much fun to play 20 questions with! It took a while to learn how to ask more broad questions, than narrowing down the mystery, one animal at a time! (Is it a horse? Is it a raccoon?) We are learning the life cycle of this amazing fish. We have learned a fun Salmon Poem that describes the salmon’s appearance. We made beautiful salmon art and read some wonderful salmon books. 

Our letter of the week was M, and we made M’s out of sticks and other fun things that we found around the forest. Brook had some fun painting with mud with the kids and we had another great scavenger hunt to familiarize ourselves with Luna’s forest. Our friend, Luna, came up to the forest with us to talk with us on how we can comfort our friends in a new environment and in different weather conditions. The weather cooperated for most of the week that we spent in the forest, and we want to thank you parents so much for the ease of transitioning to our Forest Week drop off routine! 

We would love to share all that we are learning in this amazing Honeybee class this year, and hope you can join us next week, October 8th at 12:15 in the Movement Room for our Curriculum Coffee Talk.