Sproutlings Newsletter: Week of January 25

• An important reminder to parents regarding pick up and drop off: Please be careful as you pull in and out of the parking spaces as families are loading and unloading children and we need to keep everyone safe. We ask all parents to stay with their children from door to door.
• A staff training day was originally scheduled for Friday, February 12th. In an effort to help our families, we will be open for care from 7:30 am to 12:00 pm on that day.  Pick up will begin at 11:00. Children will not eat lunch at the center. At 12:00 we will close for our teacher training. We will be closed on Monday, February 15th for Presidents Day.
• New Jersey strongly discourages all non-essential interstate travel at this time. Please be sure you are following the most updated travel restrictions. https://covid19.nj.gov/faqs/nj-information/travel-and-transportation/are-there-travel-restrictions-to-or-from-new-jersey
• As always, please provide documentation whenever your child receives a vaccination. New Universal Health Records are due at your child’s annual physical each year. If you need a copy, please email Kerry at sproutlings.info@gmail.com
• A reminder of the state sick policy regarding COVID 19:
  “Children who meet the following criteria should be promptly isolated and excluded from the facility for at least 10 days from symptom onset, are fever free for 24 hours without fever reducing medication and symptoms have improved OR they have a negative COVID-19 test result which is submitted to the childcare center.
  • At least two of the following symptoms: fever (measure or subjective), chills, rigors (shivers), myalgia (muscle aches), headache, sore throat, nausea or vomiting, diarrhea, fatigue, congestion or runny nose; OR
  • At least one of the following symptoms: cough, shortness of breath, difficulty breathing, new olfactory disorder, or new taste disorder.”
•  While we understand that children will still get colds, we greatly appreciate parents keeping children with very runny noses home for a day to recover. This keeps both the teachers and other students in the class healthy and prevents colds from being passed around the room. If a runny nose is the only symptom, a negative Covid-test is not required to return. Thank you for your help with this!

Peapods

This week we had many new discoveries. Some of us are able to put the correct shapes in our shape sorter. We also played with our musical instruments. We made our own sounds to the song of the week, “Row,Row,Row Your Boat.” It was a lot of fun. We are continuing our signing and some of us are now “signing “ when we want to eat. Tummy time is going well. Our babies are getting used to it and starting to discover more around them. Pretty soon we’ll have  creeping babies. Ms Lu read our book of the week Llama,Llama Home with Mama by Anna Dewdney.

Seedlings

What an amazing time we had in the Seedlings room!  We have been practicing riding scooters and tricycles in the indoor playground during the cold weather. Some of us are getting the hang of it.

We had fun making a robot from a box. It was a lot of fun putting it on and pretending  to be a robot. We have loved pretending to be butterflies lately so our class decorated some butterflies to hang around the room. We also made some hearts in preparation for Valentine’s Day.

During circle time, we read Grumpy Monkey by Suzanne Lang and sang “I’m Bringing Home a Baby Bumblebee.”

Little Sprouts

It was another great week in Little Sprouts!  Even though it was freezing outside we kept ourselves warm inside with lots of dance parties! Our favorite song to dance to this week was “Shake Your Sillies Out!” We also continued with our Valentine’s Day crafts. We practiced our building skills with bristle blocks building huge towers! Our new addition to our classroom was our mask wearing charts to start encouraging masks within the classroom in a visual way! We can’t wait for next week!

Beanstalks

Everyone had the best week in Beanstalks! This week was full of new knowledge and facts and fun crafts. During circle time, we’ve been learning about new different Arctic animals like the beluga whale, arctic fox, puffin, and harp seal. The class enjoys talking about each animal and what they like about them. We’ve also been talking about hibernation and why bears hibernate! The class really enjoyed this topic, especially when we read A Long Winter’s Nap by Dr. Seuss.

We practiced our fine motor skills while tracing a penguin along with other letters and words. Additionally, we all started to get into the Valentine’s Day spirit and made so many fun crafts like our handprint dozen roses and our “Strawberries of Love” painting! We also read a Valentine’s Day book as requested by the class called, The Night Before Valentine’s Day by Heidi Petachi. Next week, the class will start making Valentine’s Day cards for each other for our class party! Just a reminder, our class party is February 10. We can’t wait to have more fun in Beanstalks next week. Have a great weekend!

Saplings

This week in Saplings (Pre K 3), we had more fun learning about pets!  We discussed the pets’ homes and why different pets need certain homes to be comfortable. We practiced putting the letters of our name in order as we glued dog paw prints on the way to our dog houses.  We worked on our hand eye coordination and small motor control while painting a fish bowl. We helped Spot get home while playing a board game. Our friends are great at taking turns and counting. Sapling friends also learned the correct way to form the letter L this week.

PreK 4

In PreK 4 this week, we continued our investigation of Arctic animals. We focused our attention on the walrus. The children learned many facts including, a walrus has approximately 450 whiskers! They children also learned how Arctic animals stay warm by conducting the blubber experiment. Using ziplock bags, with the outside covered in lard,  the children  put their hand inside the bag and then into a bowl of icy water. The children realized that the water did not feel that cold as compared to just dipping their uncovered hand in the water. They concluded that Arctic animals have a lot of blubber to keep them warm!

Letters G and Q were our HWT letters of the week. The children practiced writing them and building them with Roll-A- Dough. During our large group time, the children came up with many words beginning with the letters G and Q as we constructed a word web. Next week we will work on the letters S and A. We continued working on recognizing upper and lowercase letters. We read the story Snowmen at Night by Caralyn Buehner. The children came up with ideas about what they thought snowmen did at night. We also worked on sequential order as the children retold the story.

The children worked on a math journal where they created a picture of a walrus out of construction paper and then adding fish stickers. They then needed to count and write how many fish their walrus ate. The children started simple addition problems using mini erasers to count and add numbers. We also continued practicing patterns.

February is Dental Health Month and Black History Month. We will learn about both as well as celebrate the Chinese New Year! We have so much to look forward to!