December News: Weeks of December 2nd and 9th

Early Closing

Sproutlings will be closing at

4pm on Tuesday, December 24th

and

will be CLOSED on Wednesday, December 25th through Wednesday, January 1st 

for the Christmas and New Year Break.

Key Card Entry

Please make sure you have your keycard to enter the building. If you have mislaid your card please let us know so that we can deactivate it and issue you a new one. There will be a $15 charge for new keycards.

For security reasons – please do not hold the door open for anyone that you do not know.

Annual Flu Vaccine

All children between the ages 6 months to 5 years old who attend daycare or pre-kindergarten programs in New Jersey are required to have a flu vaccine before December 31st.

Please provide proof of vaccination to the office when your child has had their annual flu vaccine. Thank you.

2025 Holiday Closing Dates 

Our 2025 Holiday Closing Dates can be found on our website using the link below.

https://sproutlingschildcare.com/calendar/

Wishing all our Sproutlings families a very Happy Holiday season!!

Peapods

Peapods

The Peapods are getting ready for the holiday season! We can feel it and see it everywhere. Our room is decorated with snowflakes that we love to watch move back and forth from the ceiling. We also like to point to the decorations on our windows. But best of all we helped top off the holiday tree in the lobby!
We have been working on our fine motor skills stacking our blocks and some of us drew with crayons on paper — it was so exciting!
We are enjoying our holiday books. Two we have enjoyed listening to were Merry Christmas Mouse! by Laura Numeroff and Felicia Bond and Our Eight Nights of Hanukkah by Michael J. Rosen.

Peapods II

We’ve made it to the last month of 2024! We can’t believe how quickly this year went. Over the last two weeks Peapods 2 has talked about gingerbread and holiday traditions. Outside our classroom you can see our Christmas trees and dreidels that we made. Our new favorite songs have been “Jingle Bells” and “Hanukkah Oh Hanukkah.” We are always dancing and singing! In our sensory table, we have been exploring wrapping paper. Our friends have been getting creative with wearing them as hats and waving them around like flags. We have started calling our friends by their names and making conversations during both meal and playtimes. We love seeing all of the friendships that are being made. We are looking forward to the remainder of the year and celebrating the holidays with our friends and families!

Seedlings

The Seedlings have been having such a great time this month despite all the rainy days. We loved celebrating two birthdays, and we’re quite good at singing happy birthday to our friends.

We had such a fun time learning about the gingerbread man. We made and decorated our own gingerbread man face and made one for the class! We also made a class Christmas tree with handprint lights and a class dreidel.

During circle time, we read Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett and sang “Jingle Bells”. Our favorite part of the song is when we get to shout “Hey! and “Ha! Ha! Ha!”

Little Sprouts

Little Sprouts had so much fun learning about gingerbread and Holiday traditions! Some of our favorite centers were play-dough, books and dress up. Little Sprouts loved making our mini gingerbread men for the lobby and coloring our giant gingerbread on our door. We loved coloring our dreidel and putting stickers on our Christmas trees. During circle time we sang our good morning song, talked about the weather and dressed up our weather bear. We sang the days of the week, our ABC’s, and numbers and read Llama Llama Holiday Drama by Anna Dewdeny and Ten Tiny Gingerbread Men by Tiger Tales.

Beanstalks

What a fantastic two weeks we’ve had here in Beanstalks! Last week we talked about snow and made our own melted snowmen! This week we talked about gingerbread and made some gingerbread people. We loved reading Gingerbread Baby and dancing to “Cookie Bakers of the Night” by Laurie Berkner. We hope you all have a safe and happy weekend and we’ll see you next week!

Saplings

The past two weeks we had so much fun learning about gingerbread and holidays around the world. Last week we discussed gingerbread. We used cookie cutters to make a gingerbread pattern, decorated a class gingerbread and made our own gingerbread using mixed media. Our favorite books from the week were Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett and The Gingerbread Bear by Robert Dennis.

This week we are learning about different holidays. We started the week discussing Christmas. We decorated a Christmas tree in a roll and count activity and decorated our own Christmas sweaters. At the end of the week we discussed Hanukkah. We decorated our own dreidels and made our name out of dreidel letters. Our favorite books from this week were Bear Stays Up for Christmas by Karma Wilson and I Know An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Dreidel by Caryn Yacowitz. We are looking forward to learning about more holidays by continuing to discuss Hanukkah and Kwanzaa.

PreK 3

PreK 3 has moved into cold temperatures and has been learning about snow, ice and penguins the past two weeks.

The children made a snowman using the letters of their last name, painted with ice to make a beautiful picture and practiced using scissors to cut a “one of a kind” snowflake ! We also worked on building up our hand muscles while transferring ice cubes (sugar cubes) from one iceberg to another. PreK 3 took turns while playing Don’t Break the Ice.

During the week we discussed penguins, the children reviewed penguin shapes, created a penguin from paper and practiced cutting penguin pictures. We reviewed numbers by counting the number of fish we fed the penguins. The children also painted a picture of a penguin with Q-Tips.

Some of the books we read were The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats, The Inside Story Of An Igloo by Dana Meade Ray, Tacky The Penguin by Helen Lester, and Penguin And Pinecone by Salina Yoon.

PreK 4