Sproutlings Newsletter: Week of October 12

Reminders and Upcoming Events:

• Please be sure you ask for an updated Universal Health Record at your child’s annual well visit every year. Please submit these to Kerry.
• All students 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.
• Sproutlings is organizing a fun and safe Halloween celebration on October 30th. Students will have fun doing socially distant trick-or-treating. Thank you to everyone who has donated items!
  We are still looking for parents to donate the following:
  -sealed bags of individually wrapped (nut free) snacks such as pretzels, Pirate’s Booty, apple sauce pouches, or goldfish
  –nut free treats like small M&M bags, fruit snacks, etc.
  -Items such as Halloween pencils, stickers, stamps, etc.
• –Please do not send in anything with nuts or hard candy that can be a choking hazard.

  All treats will be sent home with your children and no candy will be eaten at Sproutlings. If you are interested in donating items, please send them in no later than Monday, October 26th. Please be sure to let your classroom teacher know they are for Halloween. We will use the items communally, center wide.

Peapods

What a treat we have thanks to our friends in the Little Sprouts room. We are able to look at the great pictures of “Halloween Baby Sharks “on their door as we dance to the song! We are also having fun playing peek-a-boo looking through the cribs. Our shape sorter can be a challenge but we are up for it! The legs of the highchairs are always fun to crawl through. Ms. Lu read our book of the week The Busy Little Squirrel by Nancy Tafuri and our song was 5 Little Pumpkins.

Seedlings

What a week! The Seedlings had so many activities to do and due to the rain we’ve had this week, we made the most of our time indoors.  We made tissue paper pumpkins that decorated our door. The best part is that our picture is in the middle of the pumpkin! We love to look at them and say everyone’s name. We decorated our “Wheels on the Bus” pictures with dot-art. The Seedlings had a fantastic time making a dinosaur wall.  We all taped them to the wall and started to roar like dinosaurs. We can get very loud. Don’t be scared!

When we were able to go back outside, we had so many races around the playground. We absolutely love to run and race with each other. During circle time we read Little Owl’s Day by Divya Srinivasan and sang “5 Little Pumpkins Sitting on a Gate.”

Little Sprouts

What a busy week we had in Little Sprouts! Our theme this week was pumpkins. We sang “Five Little Pumpkins Sitting on a Gate” and “Baby Shark Boo Boo Boo”. During circle time we read “Llama Llama Trick or Treat” by Anne Dewdney and “The Biggest Pumpkin Ever” by Steven Kroll.  For art, we painted pumpkin patches using our knuckles and orange pumpkins using marbles. We also continued to work on color matching and mask wearing. We are so excited for Halloween and our upcoming party! Thank you to the parents who volunteered to bring in treats. Just a reminder so send in a jacket for outside time since the weather is getting colder. Have a great weekend and stay safe!

Beanstalks

We had such an amazing time in Beanstalks this week! We did a lot of fun activities like make bats and spiders to hang up in our classroom for Halloween. We also talked about what everyone likes most about Halloween and what they’re looking forward to. We have been reading a lot of Pete the Cat this week and everyone really liked doing our own school shoes activity. We also learned some new shapes and focused a lot on our letters and their sounds. We did a really fun new shape puzzle that everyone really enjoyed! We can’t wait to do some more Halloween activities in the next week and can’t wait to see everyone on Monday!

Beanstalks II

In the Beanstalks II class this week we began our tree study. Our favorite “tree” books were Leaf Man by Lois Ehlert and When the Leaf Blew In by Steve Metzger. After reading Leaf Man and spotting all the leaf creatures in the book, we made our own versions of Leaf Man to hang in the classroom. We got to be creative when we painted with leaves, twigs and pine needles using the Fall colors orange, yellow and red. We had fun practicing with scissors when we cut strips of paper into lots of tiny pieces!! We really enjoyed painting and creating some friendly bats to decorate our classroom door. Next week we will continue our tree study as we focus on parts of a tree.

Saplings

This week in Saplings we started our study on trees. We sorted trees parts by size, sorted button and leaves by colors, matched types of trees, and measured tree parts. We practiced writing by coloring insects different colors. (Handwriting Without Tears week sheet). We read a few great books: Our Tree Named Steve by David Catron, Abiyoyo by Michael Hays, and Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Martin Jr. and John Archambault.

PreK 4

 This week in Pre K 4 the children learned about different kinds of squirrels and how they prepare for winter. We read the story Earl the Squirrel by Don Freeman and did a literary activity based on the book Scaredy Squirrel by Melanie Watt. The children listened to the story then recalled information from the book to help fill Scaredy Squirrel’s emergency kit. For our journal activity this week, the children wrote about what they would do if they woke up and they were a squirrel. Our HWT letter was P this week and the number was 2. The children practiced writing each in their correct form.
We did many squirrel related math activities this week such as putting squirrels in number order, graphing acorns, making AB  patterns and sorting shapes. We also used play dough to help feed squirrels up to the number 10. This helped students with early addition skills and develops the concept of “how many more.”  Next week the children can look forward to a pumpkin investigation and pumpkin related activities.