Sproutlings Newsletter: Week of September 21

Reminders and Upcoming Events:

• Please be sure you ask for an updated Universal Health Record at your child’s annual well visit. These are required by the State of New Jersey for every child attending day care and we need a new one each year.
• 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.
• All students are required to get a flu shot no later than December 31st. Please bring documentation to Sproutlings. You can also send us an email with the picture of the documentation.
• Please send in extra masks for your child, especially as we approach cold season. Be sure masks are being washed every day.
• Sproutlings is organizing a fun and safe Halloween celebration on October 30th. Children will be allowed to wear costumes to school but they must be clothes that the children can comfortably stay in all day. We will have safe, socially distant “trick or treating” where students will go to different stations for candy or treats with bags they will decorate in class. One class will go at a time so that populations are not mixing. We are looking for parents to donate nut free sealed bags of individually wrapped candy, snacks, or items such as Halloween tattoos, stamps, stickers, etc. Please do not send in candy with nuts or hard candy that can be a choking hazard. All treats will be sent home 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.

Peapods

What a great week in Peapods! Our friends are enjoying hearing stories like Apples and Pumpkins and  Mouse’s First Fall by Anne Rockwall and Lauren Thompson. Some of us are doing very well with our tummy time. We’re starting to roll over and reach for our toys. Others are practicing sign language. We use “more,” “all done,” and “please.” We’ve been taking advantage of the beautiful weather and getting outside to enjoy it when we can.

Seedlings

We welcomed fall in the Seedlings this week! As always, we enjoyed going outside every day. We have started collecting leaves from the playground and we love talking about the different colors we find. We had fun painting our yellow school buses and can’t wait to put our artwork on the wall so we can see it all the time. Dinosaurs continue to be our favorite toy in the classroom. We love when Miss Bridget and Miss Kirsten play “The Dinosaur Song” while we play. Our book of the week was The Grumpy Monkey by Susan Lang.

Little Sprouts

What a fun week we had in Little Sprouts! This week we explored autumn. We sang “Autumn Leaves are Falling Down” and “Five Pumpkins Sitting on a Gate.” During circle time, we read We’re Going on a Leaf Hunt by Steve Metzger and The Busy Little Squirrel by Nancy Tafuri. For art, we sponge painted leaves on a tree to resemble the changing of leaf colors. For small group, we made leaf rubbings and colored on textured paper. Next week, we will continue talking about the season of fall/autumn.

Just a reminder to please continue to label all of your child’s belongings. We also ask that you send in a jacket for your child to wear when we go outside.

Beanstalks

This week in Beanstalks we did a lot of fun and new activities! We decided to make some owls with fall right around the corner. Everyone really enjoyed it and decided to take their owls home! In addition, we also started to learn about the seasons. Everyone really liked learning about this new topic and talking about their favorite season. We will be diving more into the seasons especially since the weather is getting colder. We listened to “The Four Seasons Song” by Jack Hartman which everyone really liked during our morning circle time! We also read a lot of new books this week such as The Lost Sock and The Little Raindrop. Reading time is definitely everyone’s favorite time of the day. We got really lucky with the weather this week and had so much fun outside. Everyone had such a fun week and we can’t wait to do more fun activities next week!

Beanstalks II

We had a fun week in the Beanstalks II this week. As we talked about our emotions, we read the books Wemberly Worried by Kevin Henkes and Scaredy Squirrel by Melanie Watt. We made faces showing different emotions using shapes and we worked hard on developing our fine motor muscles by practicing cutting play dough with scissors. The math game “How many buttons are on Pete’s shirt? was a favorite, as we learned to take turns with a dice, count and place the buttons. We enjoyed building with Legos and some of our other classroom manipulatives, using our imaginations to create and build all sorts of fun structures.

Saplings

It has been an emotional roller coaster this week. Pre K 3 has been learning about our feelings. We learned that everyone has feelings. Some of the feelings we talked about were: sad, happy, mad, excited, and shy. All of our feelings are important. It was fun to listen to the children’s answers to our question of the day.

We read The Kissing Hand by Audrey Penn, Wemberly Worried by Kevin Henkes and The Way I Feel by Janan Cain. Some friends made a kissing hand with paint while other friends had Chester help them review their numbers. We learned and practiced how to hold our crayons the correct way while coloring stars, fireflies and a moon. We were aiming and scribbling to the stars with our Handwriting Without Tears lessons.

Handwriting Without Tears is the curriculum we use to teach the children hand writing. It is a multisensory approach which uses blocks, play dough, magnets, and other fun tools to learn letter formation.

PreK 4

This week in Pre K 4 we worked on developing our fine motor skills by using tweezers to put apples on the tree. The children worked on counting consecutively as well. We worked on size and practiced our scissor skills by cutting pictures of apples we colored and then gluing them from smallest to largest.

This week we introduced our Handwriting Without Tears Curriculum (HWT) by practice making purposeful lines as we made the letter “F,” remembering all letters start at the top.

This week investigated apples. We weighed them and taste tested them and conducted a science experiment as well. The children made predictions as to whether of not apples sink or float when placed in water. They were surprised to learn that they float! We read the book Bad Apple A Tale of Friendship by Edward Hemingway.

Next week the children will investigate trees and how they change.