Hi everyone! I'm so excited to have joined the Green Sprout Family! We have been so busy with fun activities and projects in and outside of the classroom. The weather may have kept us inside for a couple of weeks but we had plenty of fun learning about community helpers and exploring different foods.  We incorporated a new and fun dramatic play set after the Bluebonnets got excited about learning all about firefighters. We also learned about how vegetables drink water just like we do by doing a fun science experiment with food coloring and celery. Our friends got to pick what color they wanted to turn our celery. 

     We've been working on pouring our own water and properly using hangers when checking into school. Our friends have been working really hard at screwing and unscrewing their own water bottle lids. We also moved in new Montessori work that the Bluebonnets are really enjoying! They love playing with the new 3D puzzles and farm animals. 

     Hopefully, this bad weather has passed and we can soon start to enjoy Spring! Have a wonderful week! 

Love, 
Candace

After a wonderful winter break, Green Sprout welcomed all of our friends back to school for a great firswt! Our Bluebonnet classroom changed a bit, with a few friends moving up from the pre-tot room, and others moving up to our primary class. Our veteran toddlers were eager to help our new friends adjust to our weekly schedule! We are so grateful for all of the community time our Sprouts enjoy on the playground so we have the opportunity to play with all of our friends from different classes!

We also loved spending time with different teachers this week, especially enjoying classroom visits with Mr. Charlie from the pre-tot room! Speaking of wonderful teachers, we were so excited to welcome our yoga and Chinese teachers back to school for our weekly lessons. We really missed them over break and were ecstatic to practice our yoga poses and Chinese words!

To celebrate the new year, we made a New Years meditation jar with pink, green, blue, and gold glitter, sequins, and beads! We also put our hands to work rolling and cutting Playdough, revisiting our Montessori works, and washing and preparing our daily snack in the morning!

While the weather was quite chilly this week, keeping us indoors for a couple of days, we got cozy and cuddly in our classroom and celebrated an extra fun dance party Friday with an afternoon vegan hot dog treat for snack!

We hope you all had a wonderful winter break and we are so happy to have you all back at Green Sprout again!

Have a wonderful and peaceful week!

Love,
Jodie

Our last week of school before winter break was filled with Christmas festivities, fun, and a whole lot of holiday love!

We started off the week decorating red paper stockings with white ripped up cotton balls courtesy of our little toddler fingers! We didn't stop our decorating there, as we put together beautiful vases of poinsettias donated to our class by one of our Bluebonnets! They are beautiful and brought so much holiday cheer to our classroom! Our week of winter-themed art finished in a sparkly, spectacular fashion as our friends created individual meditation jars as a holiday gift for their families! The toddlers had a blast adding blue and silver glitter, blue, silver, and snowflake sequins, sparkly red and silver pom poms, and most importantly, last but certainly not least, a smiling picture of their own face to their snow globe meditation jar masterpiece! We hope your holiday jars are bringing warmth, peace, harmony, and happiness to your homes!

Our art work transferred to other parts of our daily routine as our Bluebonnets finished off a special pre-break week of school decorating sugar cookies with icing in blue, yellow, pink, and green! While we enjoyed this very special Friday treat, we continued to have discussions about healthy and nutritious foods this past week as our toddlers helped their teachers to prepare morning snack!

While discussing each of our friends' different winter break plans, our conversation inspired us to take our world map off of the wall and to study the different countries, continents, oceans, and animals living around the world! We also sang our "Do You Know the Continents?" song, and enjoyed putting our minds to gathering some good worldly knowledge! We exercised our brains during our weekly Chinese class with Ms. Siugi too, and worked our bodies with Ms. Vanessa during yoga! We were so happy to be able to give our special teachers some big holiday hugs after our last classes before the break!

To continue spreading and sharing holiday cheer, our Primary friends stopped by our room to sing some Christmas carols and our entire Green Sprout community joined together for an especially fun and festive dance party Friday on the playground!

As we wrap up the first half of our school year, your toddler teachers would like to thank our Bluebonnet families for your constant generosity, kindness, and love.  We are so immensely grateful for your continuous support and dedication to your children both in and out of the classroom. They have grown so much over the past few months, as has our love for each of our toddlers and all of their families. Thank you for all that you do, every day.

We love you all so much and we wish you all very happy holidays and a wonderful new year!

Lots of love,

Jodie and Ashley

Last week we got crazy for Kwanzaa! We learned about the seven principles of Kwanzaa and embraced the traditions of unity and responsibility through a community harvest - one of the defining celebrations of the holiday!  We harvested kale, arugula, spinach, green onions, broccoli, and more!  After harvesting our gardens, we put our gorgeous greens into beautiful bundles to share with our families!

We also created Kufi hats out of black, yellow, red, and green construction paper, and made colorful collages out of the same art materials! Finally, we decorated images of Kwanzaa holiday traditions and talked about the Kinara, Kwanzaa's candleholder that holds seven candles to symbolize the seven principles of the holiday.

During our weekly yoga class with Miss Vanessa, we practiced our breathing exercises and stretches and showed off our new winter meditation jar!  Miss Vanessa absolutely loved it!  We had a great Chinese lesson with Miss Suigi learning more about seasons, and had another great afternoon of "show, tell, and share" in our classroom.  Our Sprout community also came together to enjoy a musical afternoon with a visitor who entertained us with songs and dances!

We had a great week learning about Kwanzaa and look forward to continuing to embrace other holidays for our last festive week of school before our winter break!

Have a wonderful and peaceful week!

Love,
Jodie

This past week we explored deep into the ocean, and deep into the past to also learn about Hanukkah!

Our ocean adventures began by creating a vocabulary list of marine-related words including lighthouse, boats, sharks, fish, deep, ocean ground, crabs that pinch, rocks, bubbles, sea shell, sand, and buckets, and reading a book about dolphins!

Our bubble and boat-loving Bluebonnets also created underwater collages of blue paint swirled with their fingers to create waves, blue tissue paper, and sand! We added our designs to our brand new art wall in our room featuring our Sprouts' masterpieces and photos of our little artists hard at work! Please come check out our art wall when you come to pick up your Bluebonnet! They are very proud of their work!

We finished off our ocean unit by building a fortress out of wooden blocks for our hermit crabs and allowing them to explore our classroom outside of their tank! We studied their shells and pinchers but were sure to keep our bodies and their bodies safe!

As the winter season approaches, we have started to discuss the upcoming holidays! Our first holiday was Hanukkah! We talked all about the fantastic Festival of Lights, learning about menorahs, dreidels, and latkes, decorating Hanukkah-themed pictures, creating Star of David hanging figurines out of colorful Popsicle sticks, practicing how to spin dreidels, and enjoying challah bread for our afternoon Friday snack!

Finally, to officially welcome the winter season into our classroom, we made a new and very "cool" meditation jar! Our toddlers filled it with blue and silver glitter, mini jingle bells, and blue buttons! It is a beautiful and sparkling addition to our classroom!

We had a very exciting week and we can't wait to welcome new holidays and new topics into our classroom!

Have a wonderful and peaceful week!

Love,
Jodie

Last week the cold weather arrived and inspired our friends to create our theme for the week! We appreciate the feedback our Sprout parents provided about your weekends, too!

We discussed how to stay warm in colder weather with jackets, boots, scarves, gloves, and hats, and read the books, "Cub's Big World," and "Cold Snap" by Eileen Spinelli. We also created a beautiful, winter-themed multimedia art project. First, we closed our eyes and pictured a cold, snowy landscape then took light blue, white, gold, and gray crayons to white paper to create images from our imaginations. We then painted over our drawings with blue watercolor paints and finished off our masterpieces with ripped up cotton balls (courtesy of our helpful little toddler fingers!) and blue and gold glitter!

We also talked about the seasons in Chinese class - the perfect time to learn words such as "snow" and "cold" to match with our wintry theme this week!

We finished off our week with firefighter Friday!!! Our local AFD department brought one of their fire trucks to visit Green Sprout, talked with us about what they do, showed us the uniforms that they wear, and allowed us to explore their fire truck! Our Bluebonnets absolutely loved their visit and were so happy to have the opportunity to give our firefighters the artwork we created for them as a way of saying "thank you" for all of their hard work and dedication to our community! We may just have some future Bluebonnet firefighters on our hands!

This past Monday we made a new nature jar with some contributions from one of our Bluebonnets, and, in honor of the upcoming holiday, talked about what we are thankful for, decorated name tags for a sweet granola treat made for us by the Primary class, and created both finger and paintbrush paintings with orange, red, yellow, brown, and gold paint and bordered them in twigs we collected from a nature hunt on our playground!

Your toddler teachers want to say how grateful we are for all of our Bluebonnets and their loving and supportive families! Thank you for all that you do every day! We love you all so much!

Wishing you a happy, healthy, and peaceful holiday!

Love,
Jodie