…and just like that, we are in October! Happy Rosh Hashanah, welcome to the beautiful leaves that are falling, and hello to all the returning Issaquah salmon! The playground is really chilly in the mornings, and usually about 4 or 5 degrees cooler than the temperature out on Issaquah Hobart Road, as we are in the shadow of Tiger Mountain.  The sun doesn’t hit the playground until noon, so start dressing the morning kiddos in their puffy coats and maybe some warm mittens. Please label all coats, hats and both mittens or gloves and start checking the Lost and Found shelf of the Lending Library for misplaced items.

Welcome to the month of salmon, fall leaves, pumpkins and all things Autumn! This weekend is our town’s Salmon Days Festival, the largest two-day festival in all of Washington State! The staff each spend some time at this beloved weekend, for the music, the parades, the food, the Field of Fun and the arts and crafts, but most of all, it is such a treat to run into our friends, neighbors and Garden community! Hope to see you there! The kids can wear their adorable salmon themed hats that they all made in class this week!

Curriculum Meetings are next Monday for the Crickets and Tuesday for the Bugs and Bees after drop off. Hope you can join us! Reminder to sign up for a one-on-one ten-minute zoom ‘check-in’ with a teacher the following week. We look forward to chatting with you about how your child is doing this school year! Spoiler alert! They’re all doing great! :0) We want to chat with you about where we see them excel and things we want to watch or work on. We also want to check in with you on how YOU are doing, and how we can help YOU! We are all in this together!

Read on for class news:

The Ladybugs

had fun in our classes this week! The teachers so love that we are getting news from each of the little Bugs as they play and flit about the classroom. We painted some fun salmon to attach to our hat bands, and we continue to work on our Art Show Fall Leaf creation. While we had the watercolor paints out, each Ladybug had the opportunity to frame our closing circle song, use an oil pastel to draw a big circle sun on the words, and then do a watercolor resist with the colors of the sunrise and sunset all over the song. We hope you enjoy these beautiful works of art that they have created, and we also hope that it helps you learn the words to our Closing Circle Song and join in whenever we sing this special blessing. To follow up on our “Daily Routine” wristlet book of last week, this week, we asked each Ladybug what their favorite part of the school day is. We hope you enjoy their answers. We hope to see you in the Movement Room for our Curriculum presentation next Tuesday morning right after drop off. We’d love to give you a little history of our program, tell you about the thoughts behind the curriculum that we use in the Ladybug class, and to explain to you how the Ladybug class is such an important foundation for the three years here at The Children’s Garden.

The Crickets

started the week off with a visit from Baby Burpee! Baby Burpee is the puppet who comes down off the shelf when there has been some misbehavior that we want to address at circle time. On Monday, we witnessed some pretty big pushing on the playground, and the teachers decided to have some role playing at circle. Belleamie got a toy off the shelf and sat down to play with it, when Burpee squealed with delight and plowed over Belleamie to get to the toy. The teachers are always tickled that the student who demonstrated the behavior that Burpee is copying is the student at circle that is first to say, “Burpee, you shouldn’t push your friends!”  :0) It’s a wonderful use of the puppets to demonstrate behaviors and emotions as it helps the kids ‘remove’ themselves from the situation and talk about it impersonally.  We tell the children that Burpee is too young to come to school as she doesn’t understand the rules of school or how to be at The Children’s Garden. We always offer hope to Burpee as we return her to the shelf and say that perhaps she can try and join us at circle another day. Baby Burpee comes out frequently throughout the Ladybug year and the first half of the Cricket year as the children learn the rules of the classroom and how to be a good friend. We often hear the Honeybees asking why they don’t get to see Baby Burpee at circle anymore, not realizing that they have already mastered the rules and how to conduct themselves around their friends. The Children’s Garden uses a wonderful social-emotional curriculum called “Second Step”. Cara introduced this curriculum to the Crickets on Monday, and it continues throughout the year. The first unit of Second Step is about noticing facial expressions and body language and checking in with our friends if they look sad or mad.

In the Honeybee Class, we certainly celebrated salmon, which we will get to a little bit later, but we kicked off the week, celebrating two of our Honeybees who had their 5-year-old birthdays! Ellie had a birthday circle on Monday and Audrey had a birthday circle on Tuesday. We so love our Honeybee birthday circles – they are truly a 20 -25 minute ‘tribute ceremony’ of honoring the birthday child. As a side note, on weeks where we have a Honeybee birthday celebration, or 2!, we will not send home weekly news. The birthday celebration takes a lot of interview and writing time with each student, and we don’t feel that we should take more time out of their play and work to interview and write their news.

Our Monday teaching team was Cara, Emily and Matt! Many of you know Matt from previous years at The Garden. Matt filled in for Brook when she was on maternity leave for Coco, and many of you met Matt at our Homecoming party on Friday night. Brook was feeling under the weather on Sunday and had Matt sub for her. Oh! How the children love to play tag and run and chase with Teacher Matt on the playground! Thanks, Matt for bringing such fun energy! We also had our Gibson Ek intern start on Tuesday. Aria is going to work with us this semester on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. We are so excited to work with this wonderful program again this year.

The Children’s Garden uses a wonderful social-emotional curriculum called “Second Step”. Cara introduced this curriculum to the Bees on Monday, and it continues throughout the year. They learned this curriculum in the Cricket class and are reviewing it this year to refresh the main concepts and build further on the ideas. The first unit of Second Step is about noticing facial expressions and body language and checking in with our friends if they look sad or mad.

We continued to learn about our famous Issaquah Creek Salmon this week, learning the song that is sung to the tune of “There was a Farmer had a Dog, and Bingo was its Name-O”, “I am a Salmon”. This was our poem for the week, and we made a wrist booklet, and we also learned two new ‘Star Words’, I and am. The Bees have a collection of words that they are learning to sight read and sound out. We call these “Star Words” and in the classroom, you will notice the words in stars up on the cabinets. They can now read, “A” or “a”, “am” and “I”, and we had fun writing “I am…….” sentences with their names and then recognizing “I am a Salmon” in our weekly poem. We taught the Bees that a sentence is an idea, and ends with a period, and when writing a sentence, we put a finger space between two words. We learned a lot about writing sentences this week!

The Bees had fun playing in the sensory bin with the life cycle of the salmon, complete with the predators from each stage of the life cycle. We made beautiful salmon life cycle crowns that we encourage our students to wear to Salmon Days this weekend, and we started a beautiful Art Show project, having each Honeybee do their best drawing of an adult salmon. We use a drawing instruction method called “MonArt” where we guide the children to draw each line or shape line by line, describing the shapes of the lines, (draw a rainbow shaped line, now, draw a dot, or a fish hook, etc.) and when they finish, and step back to see what they have created, they are amazed to see that they just drew a fish! Art Show projects are multi day projects that we save for our Spring Art Show. As art is a main component of our daily curriculum at The Children’s Garden, we send home lots of free easel art and daily art creations each week, but we save 4 or 5 special projects each year to showcase at our amazing Spring Art Show, one of our memorable special events.

Our study of salmon this week culminated with a visit from “Larry, the Fish Man” on Thursday. Larry is a F.I.S.H. docent at the hatchery as well as an alum Dad of The Garden, who brings us a male and female adult salmon each year for our students to see our Issaquah Celebrity Fish up close! We each had a turn to ‘touch’ or ‘squeeze’ out eggs and/or milt, if we chose, of the salmon and then watched as Larry deposited the carcasses in the creek. We will check in on the carcasses next week to see if they are still in one piece, or even if they are still there! Then we can have a wonderful circle where we talk about what might have happened to the salmon, or ‘who’ might have taken them or nibbled on them!

What a fun time of year for our students at The Children’s Garden! We are blessed to have an amazing alum community to embellish our curriculum, and we hope to see you at our Curriculum Meeting on Tuesday in the Movement Room after drop off. We will talk a little bit about the reasons behind our curriculum and how our program prepares our students for kindergarten and beyond.

Have a great weekend everyone and we hope to see you at Salmon Days! Wear your Garden Gear or your Salmon Crowns, so we are sure to spot you in the crowd!