Sproutlings Newsletter: Week of November 30

Reminders and Upcoming Events:

• All students over 6 months are required to get a flu shot no later than December 31st. Please bring documentation to Sproutlings or email us with a picture.
• If a child visits any of the states on the New Jersey restricted travel list, they are required to stay home for 14 days prior to returning to Sproutlings. Quarantine begins on the first day a child returns to NJ after travel. Please keep this in mind while planning for the holidays.New Jersey strongly discourages all non-essential interstate travel at this time.

  Travelers and residents returning from any U.S. state or territory beyond the immediate region (New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Delaware) should self-quarantine at their home for 14 days.

• Sproutlings will be closed December 24th and 25th for Christmas and December 31 and January 1st for New Years. Happy Holidays!
• Send us your holiday cards! We love decorating the lobby with all of our beautiful Sproutling family pictures! Mail us your card or send it in with your child and we will display it on our wall!

Peapods

We have had such a wonderful week. We are welcoming a new Peapod! We are continuing our signing. We’re starting to use “more” and “eat.” Some of us have discovered the pictures of our past students showing us how to sign a few words. Tummy time has really been paying off for some of us. We are now able to get to and into places our other friends go. We are also learning how to make some of our toys move. It’s very exciting.

This week Ms Grace read to us. Our book of the week is Meet Babur and His Family by Laurent de Brunhoff and Ms Kerry and Ms Grace helped us sing some songs. Our song of the week is “The Itsy Bitsy Spider.”

Seedlings

We did some dot art this week and let our creative sides take over. We like to point out which color we’re using and we are getting really good at naming all the colors. We got to enjoy some outside and were thrilled to run around and have some races too.

During circle time, we read Hop On Pop by Dr. Seuss and sang “Jingle Bells.”

Little Sprouts

It was a great week in Little Sprouts! During Circle Time we practiced singing the days of the week. We discussed the weather and decided it was very cold outside! We made winter trees using legos to paint the snow. This was really fun practice for our fine motor skills. We enjoyed counting the dots on our lady bugs. Our book of the week was The Mitten by Jan Brett. We were surprised to see how big the mitten stretched to fit all of the animals!

Miss Mikaela decorated our room for the holidays! It looks so festive!

Beanstalks

Beanstalks was a blast this week! Everyone was excited that it was the first week of December and loved sharing their favorite part about winter during circle time. Some of the things we are excited about are Christmas, spending time with family and friends, and playing in the snow. Everyone was especially excited to start doing our fun winter crafts leading up to the holidays! Some of the crafts we created this week were decorating mittens, coloring snowflakes and reindeer, and everyone got to make handprint reindeer which was definitely the class’ favorite craft of the week. In literacy, we focused on certain letters and sounds when trying to identify our own names. During centers, we looked at a new name flip book that portrayed a picture of everyone and their name. In mathematics, we used our fingers to count and started to focus on advanced numbers, shapes, and counting patterns. We had so much fun this week and can’t wait to see everyone next week. We hope everyone has a great weekend!

Beanstalks II

This week we  have spent time talking about friendship and how to be a be good friend. We spent lots of time working together in all our classroom centers and learning how to cooperate, share and be kind to one another. Painting at the easel was fun this week as we worked in pairs to mix colors together. Everyone created a drawing of the friends in our class and also worked on a class poster that had all of our names on it. The books we read this week included Stick and Stone by Beth Ferry, The Adventures of Harry and Gary – a tale of two turtles by Lisa Matsumoto and Giraffes Can’t Dance by Giles Andreae. We loved working together to complete some new 24 piece puzzles – it was a proud moment as we completed them with little or no help from our teachers.

Saplings

We have had an exciting week this week. We enjoyed hearing story’s about the children’s Thanksgiving. We did some sorting. Some of Pre K 3 sorted items that were from a tree and items not from a tree. Others friends sorted toys in piles of “made of wood” and “not made of wood.” Some friends used finger paints to make their name and sticks to make a house. While others talked about instruments made of wood and listened to their beautiful music. We also made drums and leaf people. All of our friends in Pre K 3 continue to work on our hand writing skills through the Handwriting Without Tears program.

Our books for the week were A Tree is For. . . by Judith Bauer Stamper and A Grand Old Tree by Mary Newell DePalma.

PreK 4

This week in Pre K the children explored shapes. They learned this by counting each shape’s side as well as its vertices. They children then practiced writing their numbers by writing the amount of sides and vertices each shape had.  We made “shape trees” out of construction paper and the children counted how many of each shape they used to complete their tree. They had additional practice writing numbers when they wrote their totals down after they counted.
Our letter this week in HWT was letter L and the number was 9. The children came up with many words beginning with the letter L for our word web. The children wrote about how they spent their Thanksgiving holiday for this week’s journal question and we practiced our rhyming words during our large group activity.
Next week the children can look forward to learning about Hanukkah.