December News: Week of December 13
- Send in your Holiday Cards! We will display them on our bulletin board in the lobby!
- FINAL CALL: All children ages 6 months and older are required to get their annual flu shot no later than December 30th. If your child has received their shot but you have not turned in documentation, please do so by the end of the month.
- Sproutlings will be CLOSED Thursday, December 23rd and Friday December 24th for Christmas break and Friday, December 31 for New Year’s Eve. For a list of all closures, including the 2022 calendar, please visit our website.
A Reminder of the Current Travel Policy:
For unvaccinated individuals who travel outside of our immediate region (NJ, NY, CT, PA, DE) for a period of time greater than 24 hours, the individual must:
-Get tested with a PCR test 3-5 days after travel AND stay home and self-quarantine for a full 7 days after travel before returning to school. Even if the individual tests negative, they must stay home and self-quarantine for the full 7 days
-If the individual does not get tested, they must stay home and self-quarantine for 10 days after travel before returning to school
-Please submit your child’s negative PCR test to sproutlings.info@gmail.com
–Please consult with Sproutlings Admin regarding out of country travel.
-For children in our Kindergarten and After Care programs, please consult with the New Providence School District as we will honor their protocols and procedures regarding travel.
Sick Policy Reminder:
Cold and flu season is officially here! As a childcare center, we certainly understand that children will get colds. However, we need to ensure we are following the state guidelines for Covid screening.
- If your child has a persistent cough, they must have a negative Covid test to return to school.
- If your child has two or more of the following symptoms, they must have a negative test to come back:
-Chills, Shivers, Muscle Aches, Headache, Sore Throat, Nausea/Vomiting, Diarrhea, Fatigue, Congestion/Runny Nose - Children with a fever over 100.4 must be fever free for 24 hours without the use of fever reducing medication prior to returning to school
- ***Please note, Sproutlings is accepting rapid tests for symptomatic individuals at this time. However, if your child’s doctor also chooses to submit a PCR test, we are required to wait until the results of the PCR are back, even if the results of the rapid test are negative. All test results must be submitted to sproutlings.info@gmail.com prior to your child’s return.
Peapods
Peapods I
The excitement is continuing in the Peapod room. We are enjoying the snowflakes and ornaments hanging from the ceiling! When the lights are turned off the holiday lights come on. We love watching the blinking lights.
Some of us are are honing our fine motor skills. We are finding new places to line up our stacking blocks and some of our smaller toys on a bar we use to stand up with. We are always thinking of new things to do. Our musical instruments are always fun to play with. Ms. Melissa and Ms. Laura sang “Jingle Bells” while we banged on our instruments. What joyful noise! Ms Lu read If You Take A Mouse To The Movies by Laura Numeroff and Ten Tiny Gingerbread Men.
Peapods II
This week in Peapod II we decorated our own Christmas tree using dot markers. When we were done our teachers hung them up all over the wall! We also made our own mistletoes using our feet. Do you get it? 😉 We also had a lot of fun matching animal noses with the right animal. At first we were a little confused but after a couple times we almost got the hang of it! Our teachers brought out the bubbles this week! We had so much fun. We love it when the bubbles pop right in front of us! We are getting so good at saying the word bubbles too!
Seedlings
What an exciting week the Seedlings had! We were very excited to talk about the upcoming holidays and had a fantastic time getting ready for them by decorating our room! We started off by coloring our Christmas trees with whatever crayons we wanted. We got very festive with our choices. Then, we used our dot art markers to decorate the ornaments. They look so cheerful! We also had a blast using our stickers to work on our fine motor skills by trying to get them on the lines of our classroom snowflake. We worked very hard on it and think it looks beautiful.
During circle time, we read I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen. We can’t get enough of his Hat series and always want to read them over and over again. We sang “Jingle Bells” but we were more excited to use our instruments while we were singing. It was a lot of fun!
Reminder, next week, Wednesday the 22nd, we’re having a holiday/pajama party before we go on to winter break. They are still a few items left if you would like to participate. Thank you.
Little Sprouts
We had so much fun this week in Little Sprouts! We jingled all the way using our shakers to sing along to “Jingle Bells!” We were busy working on our team work skills building towers with legos together. We also had so much fun putting large papers on the floor and coloring all together! We worked on our fine motor skills using stickers to decorate our Christmas trees. Happy holidays from little sprouts!
Beanstalks
This week in Beanstalks, we learned about winter and letter M! We learned and touched some things that start with M like mug, mirror, and milk. We learned about Christmas since Christmas is next week! We are so excited! We read some cool books such as Olafs Night Before Christmas, Cliffords First Christmas and Christmas/Navidad which we picked to be read in Spanish. It was pretty cool because Miss Kat would read it in Spanish and than explain it in English! We made some fun projects like a Christmas tree, a wreath and ornaments! Our favorite songs to sing were “Feliz Navidad” and “Jingle Bell Rock.”
Saplings (Miss Amanda and Miss Pam)
We have been celebrating the holiday season this week in the Saplings class. We began the week by collaging on large green triangles which became a beautiful Christmas tree on our classroom door. We practiced some counting skills by rolling a dice and decorating a tree with the corresponding number of dots – a great activity to test our 1:1 correspondence skills. Making candy canes from red and white beads helped us practice making an “AB” pattern and develop some very important fine motor skills. Our favorite books this week included Dream Snow by Eric Carle, Click Clack Ho Ho by Doreen Cronin, There was an Old Lady who Swallowed a Bell by Lucille Colandro and The Jolly Christmas Postman by Allan and Janet Ahlberg. Next week we will be focusing on the book Stick Man by Julia Donaldson.
Pre K 3 (Miss Amelia and Miss Deanna)
We had a week filled with holiday cheer this week in PreK-3! We got in the spirit! A few stories we read were There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Bell by Licille Collandra, Click Clack Ho Ho by Doreen Cronin, and The Wild Christmas Reindeer by Jan Brett. We decorated Christmas trees and made one big class Christmas tree for our door. We made fingerprint candy canes while also practicing AB patterns. We also hung lights while practicing identifying letters in our name. We drew our December self portrait and boy, are we getting better at drawing and tracing our names! In sensory, we worked on strengthening our fine motor muscles by making bead candy canes.
Pre K 4
“Can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man!” This week was gingerbread week in Pre K. The children heard different stories about gingerbread people such as Gingerbread Baby, Ninjabread Man and How to Catch a Gingerbread Man. The children made a comparison between each book and used ideas from the stories as a writing prompt to write what they think happened to the gingerbread man after he ran away.
Continuing with a gingerbread theme, the children worked on patterning, graphing and simple addition equations using mini erasers to count. The children enjoyed graphing the answer to the question “Which part of a gingerbread cookie would you eat first?”
Our HWT letters were I and T. We practiced correct formation, remembering letters are written starting from the top. We continued working on recognizing uppercase and lowercase letters as well as beginning letter sounds and and rhyming words.
Next week the children can look forward to creating secret holiday gifts and a holiday themed week.