Sproutlings Newsletter: Week of September 28

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.
• 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.
• 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 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.
  -Classes will participate in a Halloween “door decorating” contest. On Oct 30th, they will walk the halls and pick their favorite classroom decorations.
  -We will have safe, socially distant “trick or treating” activity where students will go to different stations for treats with bags they will decorate in class. One class will go at a time so that populations are not mixing. We will make sure the treats are age appropriate.
  -We are looking for parents to donate nut free sealed bags of individually wrapped treats, snacks, or items such as Halloween tattoos, stamps, pencils, stickers, etc. Please do not send in anything 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. We will use the items communally, center wide.

Peapods

It was another great week with the Peapods. Some of us were fortunate again to be able to enjoy the beautiful weather. We always enjoy going out. Tummy time is paying off- someone is now able to turn over and move around a bit. We have been building with our blocks making towers to knock down. Some have been busy rearranging the cribs. They like to turn the cribs in different directions.

Our good friend Elle is moving on up to the Seedings. We are going to miss her!  Our song this week was “Baa Baa Black Sheep” and our book was Harvest Party! by Jennifer O’Connell.

Seedlings

We had tons of fun in the Seedlings room this week! We had a lot of art activities to do! We painted different kinds of fall leaves and many dinosaurs. We’re fascinated with dinosaurs. We have our newly painted dinosaurs on our walls so we can see them all day long!

We love to do our animals sounds and try to identify what animal makes each sound. We’re really good at this game!!  We played with bubbles this week. We were so excited to try to catch them and pop them.  We even tried to pop them with different objects we found in our room.

During circle time, we read  I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen and sang “Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed.”

Please give a warm welcome to our new friend, Elle!

Little Sprouts

We had a lot of fun in Little Sprouts this week! We continued to talk about the season of fall/autumn. During circle time, we read Mouse’s First Fall by Lauren Thompson and The Busy Little Squirrel by Nancy Tafuri. For art, we painted corn using legos! We love using different objects to paint with. We are continuing to work on wearing our masks for a long period of time. Please help us by practicing at home!

Next week we will be talking all out farms. Have a great weekend a stay safe!

Beanstalks

This week in Beanstalks we had so much fun learning about fall! One of our favorite activities was painting our own foam pumpkins and bringing them home to our families. We also talked about what occurs in the fall. We talked about everyone’s favorite activity they like to do with their families was when it starts to get cool out! Additionally, we used different collage materials and decorated our own fall items that everyone really enjoyed! Not only did we talk about fall this week, but we talked about the seasons in order. Everyone was really excited to talk about what they like to do in each season. In our class, everyone really enjoys the book The Little Sock and it is definitely a class favorite. Everyone looks forward to our read aloud time and picking out different books to read. We can’t wait to see everyone next week!

Beanstalks II

In the Beanstalks II class we had a busy week learning about fall and all the fun things we can do in the fall. We worked hard developing our fine motor muscles as we went “Apple Picking” with tweezers and tiny apples. The apple spice play dough smelt so good and it was fun to stamp the letters from our names into it. After we read My Leaf Book by Monica Wellington we painted leaves with fall colors using large wooden balls. They will look beautiful as they hang in our classroom. We loved making orange paint this week when we mixed red and yellow together. The book Mouse Paint by Ellen Walsh helped us to learn what happens when we mix paint colors together. Our favorite books by far this week have been our class books – Who Am I? and I Love My School Shoes because there were pictures of us inside them!!

Saplings

This week in Saplings (Pre K 3) we fall into the fun of autumn. We learned all about autumn. We answered the questions, “What clothes do we wear?” “What happens to the trees?”  and “What do the squirrels do in autumn?”

We had fun coloring autumn coloring sheets, matching different types of trees, counting pumpkin seeds, making leaf sun catchers and leaf rubbings. We practiced holding our pencils correctly while coloring stars in with our Handwriting Without Tears worksheet.
We read some exciting books this week including Fall Leaves by Ericka L. Shores, Red Leaf, Yellow Leaf by Lois Ehlert, The Busy Little Squirrel by Nancy Tafuri and I See a Leaf  by Grace Maccarone.

PreK 4

This week in Pre K 4, the children learned about evergreen and deciduous trees. As part of our investigation of trees, the children learned about the different parts of a tree and what can be found on a tree such as pinecones or fruit. Through a science experiment and an art project,  the children learned how trees drink water as well as what happens to them when the seasons change.

The children worked on their math skills by recognizing numbers and counting leaves as well as sorting leaves by their characteristics into different groups. This week’s HWT letter was letter E. The children practiced writing the letter and learned its letter sound by helping to create a letter E word web. We read the story Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Martin Jr. followed by a letter matching activity. The children also enjoyed two other stories, Fletcher and the Falling Leaves by Julia Rawlinson and There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed Some Leaves by Lucille Colandro.

Next week the children will be learning about fire prevention.