What a great first full week of school at The Garden!

Last Friday evening, we celebrated our first of many memorable special events of the school year, our fabulous Apple Fest. We welcomed over 100 members of our Garden Community, with most of our current families attending, as well as alumni from almost 25 years ago! What a treat to visit with you all on the playground, as well as cranking cider in the press, sampling the delicious potluck items, and enjoying our good old-fashioned sing-along! Thank you for providing all the apples throughout the week and joining us at our Festival. The weather started out beautifully, and the light drizzle came along just in time to let us know it was time to get the little ones home.

On Sunday, The Movement Room hosted a Board and Staff Retreat/workshop day, complete with our September Board meeting and our facilitator, also an alum, Ali Marcus, who guided us through brainstorming about our program those things that are going well and those things that need some fine tuning. Thank you to our board members and our staff for coming in on a Sunday and stepping up to keep our program running smoothly throughout this year and many more to come.

On Tuesday evening, the fundraising committee met to finalize all the plans for next week’s fun Homecoming event. Homecoming is not a fundraising event but is a fun ‘adults only’ event where we celebrate the history of the school with alums and current families and have a good old-fashioned tailgating style party, complete with a chili cook off, a dessert bake off and lots of tailgate style games. We hope to see you all there next Friday at 6pm at Blakely Hall. Click on the QR code above or in the gazebo to get all the details and sign up.

Even when class is not in session, there is so much going on to keep the school year running smoothly!

As is typical when we all return to school and spend more time indoors, our immune systems are taxed more than usual and we already have some bugs running through the school. We’ve had a few substitute teachers and some community members subbing for Brin. Keep washing your hands, get plenty of rest and get lots of healthy foods and vitamins!

This week in the classroom and on the playground, we continued to learn about apples. The older students tasted red, green and yellow apples and we graphed their favorites. The Bees all received stars on our ‘Poems We Know’ chart, as they stood at circle and recited “Way Up High”, and the “Silly Snake” poem. The Honeybees are also learning a different letter of the alphabet each week. This week is the letter “S”. Next week is “M” and the following week will be “I”. The letters are introduced in this order so that we can begin putting the letters together to make words earlier in the year and these kiddos can begin to READ words! I, am, a, as, etc. Each week we also reinforce the use of the lines on the paper, the head line, the belt line and the foot line as we learn to write upper and lower case letters.  

The Crickets moved on to learn about the letter “B” as our letter of the week, and the Bees learned about the letter “S” this week. The Crickets finished a fun apple craft, where they cut an apple shape into pieces and then used the puzzle pieces to assemble some apples on their papers. We also completed our September calendars, a small printout that we introduce with each new month.

We celebrated Canyon’s birthday on Tuesday and Riley’s birthday on Thursday in the Ladybug class. Both of our friends turned 3 on Wednesday. Ladybugs entered the classroom on Tuesday with little to no tears and the children were smiling and playing within minutes of drop off. We started to make our little booklets that we love at the school, this week our book about our Daily Routine, and we finished off the week sending the kids down the brick pathway with a fun ‘Ladybug Hat’ to celebrate their first full week of preschool!

Next week, our friend Nigel is coming on Tuesday and Wednesday for picture days! Ladybugs and Honeybees will have individual and class pictures taken on Tuesday and the Crickets will have their pictures taken on Wednesday. We won’t have paints out on Tuesday and Wednesday in case you want to send the kids in nicer clothes for pictures.

Have a great weekend! Stay healthy!