Welcome to Fall!

Here we are at the end of September and most of the staff and students are now settled into our daily routine here at The Garden. How are you, the parents, doing!? Feel free to ask for any pointers or ideas on how to make your routine smoother.

The staff love our curriculum sessions, as we have the opportunity to tell you all about our program and why we claim bragging rights for the best preschool around! We hope at least one adult for each student can make the meeting for your student’s class level. The goal of these sessions is to inform you about the theory and teaching methods that we use at The Children’s Garden. For more individualized information about your student, we have our fall check-ins coming up in just a few weeks. These are 10-minute zoom sessions between the parents and a teacher, where the focus is on how your child is handling and adjusting to the program, and areas where we might need to work together to help your student do better. In the spring, we have 25-minute parent teacher conference zooms, accompanied by a written report on the progress of your child, as well as written assessments and other materials to show their growth. AND, of course, you can talk to a staff member at any time during drop off or pick up, or give a call, text, or email to any staff member if you ever have questions or concerns. We’re all in this together as a team, village and community, to set you and your child up for success!

Tonight is our lovely fall tradition, Homecoming! We hope to have you all there to celebrate the history of The Children’s Garden, have fun hanging out with new friends and old, and meet some of our amazing alum community. We can’t wait for this typical ‘tailgate party’, complete with chili cook off, beer pong, cornhole and more. Show your Garden spirit, wear your new or retro Garden gear and plan on having a blast!

In the classroom, we are excited to have our staff all back on a regular schedule. Here is the breakdown of our staff schedules for your information:

Cricket Teachers are Brook, Cara and Donna

Ladybug Teachers are Cara, Cari and Donna

Honeybee Teachers are Brook and Emily every day, Donna and Cara share the Bees afternoons

Donna is in Monday and Tuesday afternoons, and Cara is in Wednesday and Thursday afternoons.

Brook, Cara, Emily and Donna all work Friday afternoon doing Cricket and Honeybee planning.

Cari, Cara and Donna do Ladybug planning during the 60 minutes after class on Tuesday and Thursdays

Brin is in the office every day, Monday to Friday.

Our staff have appointments and schedule blips, along with life events and responsibilities, just like you! We try hard to make these happen during our time off, but there are some things that we can’t work around. We try to use in house staff as our substitutes, but we also have a wonderful sub list of educators that are part of The Garden Community. Every once in a while, we might send out a text message to class parents if a staff member has an illness or an emergency, asking if there is a parent who would like to work in the classroom for the session. We are blessed to have such a supportive community and system in place!

Now on to classroom news:

The Ladybugs are such a cool group this year, already using their words to ask for turns and playing together on the rug.  We made our first of many ‘peek a boo booklets’ this week, making a booklet out of our Daily Routine at school. The children love these booklets, and we repeat the words of the books several times throughout the week so that the kids can memorize them. We encourage you to take the opportunity to have your child “read” their booklets to you. It’s a wonderful introduction to literacy. We call them “peek a boo” booklets, because during their cutting practice, they form a ‘window’ in the booklet that they love playing ‘peek’ with the teacher. These booklets teach many skills, cutting, using tools to make a hole, threading a ribbon through the hole, and coloring and framing their work. We used the rest of the apples from our Apple Fest to make delicious apple sauce in each class. A delicious scent for the classroom this week- cinnamon apple sauce! The Bugs started an art project around a fall theme that we will save for our Spring Art Show. Throughout the year, we do 3 or 4 multi step process art projects that we are doing specifically for the Art Show. We also do thematic art projects throughout the year that the children bring home with their weekly mail, after they have decorated our classroom. This week, we did fish printing, with a rubber salmon. If you get a chance, walk through the classroom to see their beautiful artwork.

The Crickets had a wonderful sound basket from our friend, Coco, full of items that started with the letter, “C”. We practiced writing Cs and we did our news. We shifted from apples to salmon as we asked the kids what they already knew about salmon. We loved hearing that ‘they like to eat cheeseburgers, and they have legs’. In a few weeks we will have our friend and alum dad, “Larry the Fish Man”, who is also a F.I.S.H. docent at the Hatchery, join us for a session where he brings us a male and female salmon from the hatchery, that the kids can touch, see the eggs and milt being expressed and learn more about this Issaquah celebrity species! We will ask the kids again at the end of our salmon unit what they know about this amazing animal, and always enjoy seeing all that they learned. We used the rest of the apples from our Apple Fest to make delicious apple sauce in each class. A delicious scent for the classroom this week- cinnamon apple sauce! The Crickets started an art project around the salmon theme that we will save for our Spring Art Show. Throughout the year, we do 4 or 5 multi step process art projects that we are doing specifically for the Art Show. We also do thematic art projects throughout the year that the children bring home with their weekly mail, after they have decorated our classroom. This week, we did fish printing, with a rubber salmon. If you get a chance, walk through the classroom to see their beautiful artwork.

The Honeybees learned all about the letter “M”. We remembered that “MMMmmmmmm” was a part of our Apple Tree poem, and also learned the song that is sung to the tune of “If you’re happy and you know it”, called “Where do we Start Our Letters? At the Top! At the Top!” We all shared words that we knew that started with the letter M, and one of those words, was ‘Mystery’. The Honeybee class has a few “Mystery Containers” that we play with throughout the year, guessing what is inside. This week, we played 20 questions and discovered that a Salmon was in the mystery container. In a few weeks we will have our friend and alum dad, “Larry the Fish Man”, who is also a F.I.S.H. docent at the Hatchery, join us for a session where he brings us a male and female salmon from the hatchery, that the kids can touch, see the eggs and milt being expressed and learn more about this Issaquah celebrity species! We will ask the kids again at the end of our salmon unit what they know about this amazing animal, and always enjoy seeing all that they learned. One cool part of this curriculum is that the Bees will watch Larry as he deposits the fish carcasses in the creek, and then observe each day during the following week, to see what happens to those carcasses – where they may have gone, who might have nibbled on them, etc. We sure do live in an amazing place, so rich and full of learning experiences for us and our children! We used the rest of the apples from our Apple Fest to make delicious apple sauce in each class. A delicious scent for the classroom this week- cinnamon apple sauce! The Bees started an art project around the salmon theme that we will save for our Spring Art Show. Throughout the year, we do 4 or 5 multi step process art projects that we are doing specifically for the Art Show. We also do thematic art projects throughout the year that the children bring home with their weekly mail, after they have decorated our classroom. This week, we did fish printing, with a rubber salmon. If you get a chance, walk through the classroom to see their beautiful artwork. Our poem this week is our opening circle poem of intention that we use after three deep breaths at circle to state our ‘life mission’ of treating all people kindly, taking good care of the earth and trying to be the best that we can be. Again, we are so proud of our Bees this year for standing individually and reciting their poems at circle and getting a star on the star chart!

Each year we partner with Gibson Ek to have a high school intern in our Honeybee class. We are excited to welcome Aria to this year’s class starting Tuesday, October 1. The kids will see her every Tuesday and Thursday.

Have a great weekend everyone! See you next week, in October!