Sproutlings Newsletter – Weeks of April 13th and April 20th

Follow us on Facebook and Instagram for more updates! www.facebook.com/sproutlingschildcare/ www.instagram.com/sproutlingschildcare

We’re thrilled to invite all Sproutlings families to our 2026 Trike-A-Thon on Saturday, May 2nd from 10:30–11:30 AM! This fun-filled event supports St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and teaches our little ones about bike and riding toy safety in a playful, hands-on way. Your child can bring a bike, scooter, wagon, or stroller! Even our tiniest Sproutlings can join by strolling along with their grown-ups. It’s a wonderful chance to connect with other families while supporting an amazing cause. Use the following link to donate to a great cause! http://fundraising.stjude.org/Sproutlings2026

Please make sure you have your keycard to enter the building. For security purposes the keycard registers who is entering the building. If you have mislaid your card, please let us know so that we can deactivate it and issue you a new one. There will be a $15 charge for new keycards. If you do not have your keycard at pick up or drop off, please expect a wait. Please do not hold the door open for anyone that you do not know.

Our 2026 Holiday Closing Dates can be found on our website. https://sproutlingschildcare.com/calendar/

These past two weeks have been so much fun! We’ve been taking full advantage of the beautiful weather by splitting our time between the indoor and outdoor playgrounds. Whether we were feeling the breeze outside or exploring the climbing structures inside, the energy was high and the smiles were endless. Our friends got hands-on with our Bottle Cap Jar sensory activity. It was a hit! Watching them concentrate on grasping the caps and dropping them into the jar was wonderful for their fine motor skills. Speaking of skills, our “little movers” are making incredible progress. We are seeing so much improvement with walking every day! We also have been doing very well communicating by signing “all done” and “more”! We enjoy singing our favorite song’s “if you’re happy and you know it” and “head shoulders knees and toes”. It’s so much fun acting it out!

Spring has officially sprung and the Peapods 2 class has been having so much fun! We’ve been spending a lot of time outside. We have been enjoying riding the rockets, playing catch with the balls and playing in the play house. This month we’ve noticed a lot of development amongst our class! We’re addressing each other by our names, we’ve been communicating the steps to different tasks with either sign language or words, and we’ve been doing amazing at playing with each other and inviting friends to play in certain areas. We read a new book titled The Busy Little Tractor by Little Hippo Books and have been enjoying singing and dancing to “Old MacDonald.” We are looking forward to seeing what the last week of April will bring us and welcoming another new month.

What fun the Seedlings have been having! We had an exciting time learning about farms, the animals that live on them, and Earth Day/recycling. We had a great time exploring the farm theme by making our own muddy pigs and black sheep, and painting a big red barn. In our sensory bin, it was so much fun using real hay and searching for barnyard animals. For Earth Day, we worked on a recycling collage project. The children had fun gluing different items with a variety of textures and colors onto black paper. We also added these materials to the sensory bin and practiced “cleaning” the water. We made handprint Earths and created a tissue paper Earth from space. During circle time, we read My Farm Friends by Wendell Minor and sang “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” We absolutely loved making all the animal sounds, but our favorite was snorting like a pig!

The past two weeks have been filled with fun and learning as we explored two exciting themes: Pets and Earth Day/recycling! Storytime was a big hit, and we loved reading Hello, World! Pets by Jill McDonald and Mrs. Peanuckle’s Earth Alphabet by Mrs. Peanuckle. Our young artists stayed busy creating wonderful projects. They made handprint cats, fork-painted dogs, shaving cream Earths, recycled trees, and beautiful Earth suncatchers. We were very excited to release our butterflies! We hope everyone has a wonderful weekend!

We had so much fun these past two weeks in Beanstalks! We spent the time learning about birds and Earth Day/recycling. For our bird week, we started our days by singing “Five Little Ducks” and read many books together, including “Peely Wally” by Kali Stileman and “Little Quack Hide and Seek” by Lauren Thompson. The children made two different bird crafts—an owl and a peacock—where everyone had a chance to work with scissors, paint, glitter, and glue. Our bird-themed sensory bin featured paper eggs with shapes on them, allowing each child to practice identifying shapes. We also worked on fine motor skills by scooping rice with spoons in a sensory bin. We are now learning about recycling and Earth Day, talking each day about what we like about our planet. We completed a trash sorting activity that focused on number and color identification. We also read “I Stink!” by Kate and Jim McMullan and made our own garbage trucks using paper collages. As a class, we used paintbrushes to create the Earth. We have had so much fun playing with the coaches during Stretch and Grow and singing with our music teacher, Ms. Stephanie! Over the next two weeks, our theme will be plants and flowers.

What a beautiful two weeks we’ve had here in Beanstalks II. Last week we continued our discussion on birds. We were very excited to roll a die and stick the corresponding number of feathers on our bird! We really enjoyed reading Silly Tilly by Eileen Spinelli and pointing out all the silly goose behaviors Tilly got up to. This week we are talking about Recycling while we celebrate Earth Day. We loved getting to sort all the pouch caps we’d saved up! Our favorite book this week was Something from Nothing by Phoebe Gilman and we had lots of great ideas for what we would turn our blankets into. We hope you all have a wonderful weekend and we’ll see you next week!

We’ve had another wonderful few weeks here in Saplings! After beginning our exploration of birds, we decided to dive a little deeper by learning about specific birds that can fly and those that cannot. From there, we transitioned into learning about Earth Day and the importance of recycling. Our friends enjoyed many hands-on activities throughout these themes. We created flamingos using paper plates and explored the differences between ostriches and emus by examining and crafting with feathers. The children were very engaged as they discovered what makes each bird unique! As we wrapped up our bird study, we shifted our focus to Earth Day and why we celebrate it. We explored the difference between recycling and trash by inviting our friends to bring in recyclables from home. One of our favorite projects was working together to create a large Earth collage using torn pieces of blue and green paper. We also practiced shape recognition by matching Earth shapes, which the children really enjoyed. Additionally, we incorporated name recognition by having the children find and paste the letters of their names onto their very own recycling bins! Some of the books we enjoyed reading during this time included Edward the Emu, Little Owl’s Colors, The Earth Book, The Adventures of Gary and Harry: A Tale of Two Turtles, and I Stink. We are looking forward to another week filled with learning, creativity, and exploration!

Pre-K 3 has taken flight over the past two weeks while learning all about birds. The children learned about various bird species and their different parts. Pre-K 3 created nests by cutting paper and adding lettered eggs to spell out their names. The children also practiced their fine motor skills by cutting paper to create feathers for a class bird. The children fed birds numbered crackers and used math cubes to measure the length of different feathers. We practiced counting the cubes to see which feather had the most. The children also enjoyed writing letters in corn. Some of our favorite books were Bird Singing, Bird Winging by Marilyn Singer, Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! by Mo Willems, Egg by Kevin Henkes, and Hooray for Birds! by Lucy Cousins. And our butterflies have hatched! The children had so much fun naming them and releasing them into the world!

In Pre K 4, the children finished up their investigation into insects by releasing all of our butterflies, ladybugs and Praying Mantises outside. The children really enjoyed watching each phase of their life cycles. We had an opportunity to do some planting in our classrooms. Ms. Alice’s friends planted Sunflowers, Ms. Kelly’s friends planted pumpkins, and Ms. Jen’s friends planted Zinnia. We talked about what a plant needs to grow, parts of a plant and its life cycle. Each day the children have been checking their plants’ growth! We enjoyed listening to stories such as Florette by Alice Walker and The Flower Thief by Alice Hemming. The children continued working on their pre-reading skills by way of letter recognition, beginning letter sounds matching, and rhyming. Our math concepts included addition, more or less, and patterning. Next week the children can look forward to talking about Butterflies and happenings on a farm!