Sproutlings Newsletter: Week of October 26

Reminders and Upcoming Events:

• A big THANK YOU to all our parents for making our Halloween celebration such a success. The children had a blast! Thank you to all the families who donated goodies. Please be sure to look through your child’s bag to make sure you approve of what came home.
• An updated Universal Health Record is required after 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. Please keep this in mind while planning for the holidays. Parents are required to check the most updated list before leaving New Jersey.
• Picture Day for our daycare is Tuesday, November 17th! Rain date: November 19th.
  (Full Day Kindergarten- Picture Day is Tuesday, November 10th)

Peapods

We had a very exciting week. One of our Peapods started walking! It’s so exciting. We we also busy dancing 🕺 at the bar. We love to watch ourselves dance. We continue to practice signing and identifying our animals on the wall. A favorite of ours is looking at our family pictures. We love to touch and point to our family. Ms Lu read Sixteen Runaway Pumpkins by Dianne Ochiltree and Ms Melissa helped sing “The Monster Mash.”

Seedlings

This was one exciting week!! The Seedlings talked about Halloween and we were thrilled to have a Halloween party on Friday. We would like to say thank you to all the parents who brought snacks for our party. The Seedlings decorated their Halloween bags with dot art and stickers. We love stickers! They help us with our fine motor skills.  Unfortunately, we couldn’t go outside most of the week due to the rain but we made the most of it.  We had a lot of dance parties and loved stepping on the electric keyboard.

During circle time, we read Spookie Pookie by Sandra Bounton and sang “5 Little Pumpkins Sitting On A Gate.” Lastly, we would like to welcome our new friend Charlotte to the Seedlings room. We can’t wait to meet you!

Little Sprouts

What a spooky week we had in Little Sprouts! We celebrated Halloween all week long! During circle time read Llama Llama Trick or Treat by Anne Dewdney and Little Goblins Ten by Pamela Jane. We sang “Five Little Pumpkins Sitting on a Gate” and “Baby Shark Boo Boo Boo” all week long. For art, we made coffee filter bats that are flying around the room. We also decorated our trick-or-treat bags using colorful stamps. We can’t wait to see what all our friends are dressing up as for Halloween. Thank you to the parents who volunteered to bring in items for our Halloween Party! We would also like to thank all the parents who donated items for our trick-or-treating! We had so much fun celebrating Halloween! Have a great weekend and stay safe!

Beanstalks

This week the Beanstalks room was filled with Halloween fun and learning! We did so many activities like make puffy ghosts and spooky Halloween masks! We also worked a lot on our numbers and counting this week. We counted on our fingers when doing certain activities such as reading the book Five Little Pumpkins. We are starting to get into a new topic- holidays! Now that everyone knows their seasons, we can dive into what holidays occur in each season. We are all going to have so much fun at our Halloween party on Friday. We will play some Halloween bingo! We can’t wait to see you all next week and hope everyone has a very happy Halloween.

Beanstalks II

Who lives in trees? This was our question of the week and we had lots of fun discovering who might live in the trees in our gardens. We got to look closely at a real birds nest and discover what the birds use to make their nests and then we had fun making our own birds nests using play dough and small sticks. We read the book The Busy Little Squirrel by Nancy Tafuri and painted a squirrel using a sponge instead of a brush. We talked about what our busy squirrels were doing and why they might be so busy during the Fall. The game Sneaky Squirrel was lots of fun to play with our friends and as well helping us develop fine motor skills it helped us practice some social skills especially how to take a turn. Our favorite book this week was Go Away Big Green Monster by Ed Emberley. We loved the repeating words in the book and joining in as they appeared in the book. We made a new class book to go in our library this week. It is called Letters in our Name. It was fun to count the letters in our name and stick them onto a page in our special book.

Saplings

In the Saplings class this week we had lots of fun getting ready for Halloween as well as continuing our tree study. This week in our tree study, we learned about all types of animals who live in trees. We discussed what is helpful and harmful to trees. As a class we came up with a list. At large group as a class we learned the song “I’m a Sturdy Oak Tree.”

In art, we used our creativity and painted pumpkins, while some of us made spooky spiders. During small group, we did a fun letter find game. The children were able to identify the letters and find it on their letter board. In math we had some Halloween fun and counted with spiders ! Our favorite books this week were A Tree Named Steve by Alan Zweibel and Who Lives in Trees by Trish Holland. Next week we’ll be learning about what grows on trees!

PreK 4

This week in Pre K 4 the children excitedly talked about Halloween and the anticipation of all the fun they were going to have celebrating. In keeping with the spirit of the holiday, we read the book Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson and There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Bat by Lucille Colandro. The children listened carefully to each story and then retold the story through pictures working on sequential order.

We worked on number sense, learning and understanding quantities, more and less, number order and graphing. The children used clip cards, ten frame grids and Halloween themed mini erasers to count and order numbers.

This week we practiced writing the letter R and the number 4 using HWT worksheets and then reinforced the letter and number by using the HWT Roll-A-Dough materials.  The children also worked on understanding the letters of the alphabet. We reinforced that the letters L,M,N,O and P are individual letters as opposed to the word “el-em-en-oh” when reciting.

Next week, in keeping with current events, the children will learn what it means to vote!