Our week kicked off on Monday morning with Brook needing to stay home with her son, so we had Matt as a substitute teacher. Oh! How the children loved chasing Matt around the playground, playing monsters, freeze tag and hide and seek! The pouring rain, for the most part, happened when students were not outside, and we actually had quite a bit of sunshine!

Thank you to everyone who has contributed to Belleamie’s gifts already! This is our fall virtual fundraising campaign, and we celebrate Belleamie’s birthday. Belleamie, our beloved puppet, has asked our students how they are feeling, every day, for over 45 years. We so love celebrating her and are so grateful to everyone who helps us reach our goal for this fundraiser.

We started reading some ‘spooky’ Halloween stories in class, our Cricket class started using a ‘vote’ to choose different stories at circle, and the Honeybees started learning about being a good community member – learning what a citizen can do, what a vote is, and what an election is all about. We absolutely love to help our students join in on family conversations and share what they know.

Nigel’s pictures came out this week and each year, we are impressed with how beautiful our students are, inside and out! If your child missed their picture day, or if you are not pleased with your child’s picture, we have a make up session scheduled with Nigel on Monday, November 4 from 11:00am -12:30pm.

We hope you are enjoying the beautiful fall art around the campus. The students are very proud of their work.

Next week we celebrate Halloween on Wednesday for the Cricket Class and Thursday for the Bugs and Bees. Please see our Halloween page for costume guidelines and information about The Children’s Garden Halloween celebration. We put the easel paints away so that costumes do not get stained, and we try to ensure that the kids go home with all parts of their costumes intact, so please label all of the different components!

Read on for class news.

The Ladybugs
We love how comfortable our Ladybugs have grown, so quickly, with the teachers and with their classmates. Working with the kids on how to share took the better part of Tuesday’s class. WE spent a lot of time modelling, asking for a toy, asking for a turn, etc. These kids already know their classmates’ names, they are finding friends that they enjoy playing with and they are practicing making good choices. This is all age appropriate and shows the amazing growth that is happening each and every day for these littles. We hope to grow our Ladybug class by 3 or 4 students in the next few months, so please spread the word in your communities.

We made our “Itsy Bitsy Spider” booklets, and finished our Fall Art Show piece, based on 5 little pumpkins, and we learned a new song at circle time, “This is Big, Big, Big, this is Small, Small, Small”. Each Ladybug has the opportunity every session to stand up and dance about their clothes in front of their classmates. As our Bugs grow confidence, we invite them to stand up and sing a solo of the song that we are learning each week. This week, we invited them to stand up and sing “Itsy Bitsy Spider”. We are so thrilled with the growing confidence of these littlest littles.

We celebrated Belleamie’s birthday on Thursday and had so much fun with our red balloons and Belleamie Finger Puppets. Thank you for your participation in Belleamie’s Birthday Gifts Fundraiser Campaign. Please make your donation before Sunday evening.

The Crickets
What a fun morning we had on Monday to kick off our week! The rain held off and Matt was subbing for Brook. The kids loved chasing Matt around the playground and playing tag and hide and seek with him! Lots of running outside on the playground means a calmer, quieter classroom. :0)
In the classroom, we had a wonderful sound basket from Oliver for the letter, “G”. We had fun looking for other things that started with the hard “G” sound, like Goat, and practiced writing Gs, using a good pencil grip.

We did news and practiced writing our names, tracing first and then trying without tracing. The Crickets have really seen a lot of change in their skills in just a few months. We celebrated Elli’s 4th trip around the sun on Wednesday at her birthday circle. We had a few minutes left at the end of class and decided to have the kids stand up and recite “Itsy Bitsy Spider” as a solo. Each student stood up and said, “Hi, my name is Donna, and I am going to recite ‘Itsy Bitsy Spider’”, and then they did! Bravo Crickets!

We started reading spooky books, and the kids love them. We always assure them that they are not tooooooo spooky, but they are just fun books that we like to read around Halloween. On Wednesday, we pulled out a Garden classic, “Bony Legs” and after ‘reading the room’, the teachers decided to go instead to “Go Away Big Green Monster”. Each Cricket took a turn to stand up and say, “Go Away Big Green Monster!”, and we all chimed in to say “You don’t scare me!” This is a wonderful opportunity for our students to stand up, use a big strong voice, not giggle and use the ‘power stance’ to show that they mean business! We want to impress upon our students that when they feel that something is not feeling right, or that someone is doing something that does not feel good, they have the power to stand up strong and say “Stop that! I don’t like it!”

We continued working on our Art Show piece. The kids are putting their ‘all’ into their artwork. We love to see it.
On Friday, we celebrated Belleamie’s birthday. How fun to receive a birthday treat of a red balloon and a Belleamie finger puppet. Thank you for your participation in Belleamie’s Birthday Gifts Fundraiser Campaign. Please make your donation before Sunday evening.

The Honeybee
What a fun start to the week we had with Matt chasing us as a monster, playing freeze tag and Hide and Seek! Donna and Emily so loved sitting, relaxing and chatting with our Bees while out of the corner of our eyes, we could see Matt and the Bees racing back and forth as they went up and down the playground! It’s always fun when Matt stops by.

Emily shared some fun flash cards with the kids at circle that showed photos of kids with different emotions and some fun fruits and vegetables that were also carved to show some different emotions. The Bees took turns to say what emotion was being illustrated and then Emily led a fun activity where she would call out an emotion and the Bees tried to show that emotion with just their faces. Such a fun social emotional exercise. We love that the kids are learning how to read what others are feeling just by looking at their facial expression and body language.

We did news and continued to work on our Art Show piece centered on salmon. We can’t wait for you to see it at our Spring Art Show.

Audrey brought in a fun sound basket about our letter of the week, “O”. We had fun looking at O and adding N, S, and G in front of it, to read new words. These kids are really grasping different concepts of literacy. We are thrilled to witness it. Almost every student has at least three or four stars on the Poetry Chart. A star means that the student has stood up at circle and recited that week’s poem. We do a lot of work on the poems at circle time, adjusting attributes of the poem, speed, rhythm, high voice, low voice, loud voice, whisper voice, etc. Whatever we do, we know that the Honeybees are listening! They are learning the poems by memory and able to recite them.

Each week we are assigned new hive mates. This week, Belleamie introduced the hive mates by showing two name cards together and the kids had to ‘read’ the names and figure out who their mate for the week is. So fun, watching them realize the initial letter and look around the circle to figure out whose name starts with that letter. You guys, it is happening!

On Tuesday, the weather was so glorious that we had another long playtime outside. We read a wonderful book called “I Voted” which explains the voting process to preschool students. Another book that we read was called “President of the Jungle”, a story about how the animals did not feel that the King of the Jungle, the lion, was being very fair and decided to form a democracy and elect a president! This week we will be reading a few books that center on elections and voting to help foster great family conversations this time of year. Next week we have an alum mom joining the Honeybee class to teach us about elections and we will hold a vote about an upcoming Honeybee activity.

On Thursday, we celebrated Belleamie’s birthday and so enjoyed receiving a red balloon and a Belleamie finger puppet from Belleamie. Thank you for your participation in Belleamie’s Birthday Gifts Fundraiser Campaign. Please make your donation before Sunday evening.
Have a great weekend everyone!