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

Last week each of our toddlers transformed into a Toddlersaurus as we talked all about dinosaurs! This all began as our Bluebonnets put together a vocabulary list of words they were interested in that included bones, crocodiles, tails, dinosaurs, dinosaur eggs, big, Rex, big teeth, and growl!

We read dinosaur books called "Tall and Long Dinosaurs" and "The Super Hungry Dinosaur," and talked about different kinds of dinosaurs including the Barosaurus, Stegosaurus, Triceratops, Elasmosaurus, and of course, the Tyrannosaurus rex!

We learned the difference between carnivores and herbivores as we discussed how certain dinosaurs ate meat while others only ate plants and leaves, and talked about dinosaur fossils, bones, and eggs.

All of this dinosaur talk increased our artistic appetites so we got to work on creating a large dinosaur egg out of a balloon, newspaper, and paper mâché. We also watercolor painted a big drawing of a triceratops that is now hanging on our wall under the window to the playground. Our friends were so proud of their work and named her, Adele! Finally, each of our Bluebonnets made a handprint painting of a stegosaurus using their best art utensils, their hands and fingers!

Throughout the week we surrounded ourselves with dinosaurs, playing with them in the sensory table full of sand out on our back deck and using our dinosaur figurines to make footprints and "fossils" in our Playdough in the classroom.

The cold weather definitely arrived in full force so we were even more grateful than usual to have Miss Vanessa come visit us to do some exercise indoors during our yoga class.

Our Chinese class was especially wonderful this week as we learned and practiced the words for various forms of transportation by singing the song, "The Wheels on the Bus" in Chinese, and a song about planes, trains, and boats!

What an adventurous and exciting week we had! We can't wait for more learning and growing to come!

Have a wonderful and peaceful week!

Love,
Jodie

Police officers, firefighters, and garbage collectors, oh my! Last week we dove head first into a conversation about our community and the people who make it, and keep it, safe, clean, and functioning! Our Bluebonnets brainstormed their very own list of community helpers and included police officers, firefighters, garbage collectors, cashiers at grocery stores, mail men and women, our grown-ups, and themselves!

Inspired by our discussion about our various community helpers, our toddlers created artwork that embraced our community culture and also served as a way of saying "thank you" to our very special helpers!

Using colorful paper and different cut-out shapes, each of our friends put together a police car, a fire truck, or a garage truck.  After they were finished gluing their masterpieces together on paper, every Bluebonnet added a special message to their artwork. Some friends said "Thank you!" while others made siren noises or talked about how much they loved their community helpers' form of transportation!

We finished the week with a community art project on the playground where each Sprout used colorful tissue paper, fake sparkly leaves, and fake branches to create "flowers" on a piece of paper that had an image of a hand holding stems for a bouquet. These will be given to our firefighters as a gift of appreciation when they come to visit us later this month!

Our Bluebonnets also experienced a different kind of art - music - as we welcomed a new friend from our community to our school on Monday to talk about and play her cello for our friends.  All of our toddlers absolutely loved listening to the cello! It was such a unique treat!

While we still do miss our friend, Miss Daphne, and our Spanish class, we were so grateful, as always, to be visited by Vanessa for our yoga class and Siugi for our Chinese class! We love our community helpers and are so thankful that they come to see us each week!

We had a wonderful week displaying our gratitude for our community and community helpers and look forward to focusing on community appreciation (amongst other weekly topics as well) throughout this month!

Have a wonderful and peaceful week!

Love,
Jodie

Last week we brought out all of our tricks and treats to prepare for the upcoming Halloween holiday!

We read Halloween-inspired books including Frankenstein and There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Bat, listened to some classic Halloween songs included Monster Mash and Trick-or-Treat, and talked all about our costumes and Halloween traditions!  We also felt inspired to discuss Día de los Muertos and looked at pictures of sugar skills and holiday parades!

Trick-or-treating would not be possible without a holiday-inspired bag to hold all of the goodies so our friends used watercolor paints, stickers, black and orange pieces of tissue paper, dotter paints, and orange and black markers to decorate brown paper bags that they used on Friday for their in-school Green Sprout trick-or-treating fun! Thanks to all of our Bluebonnet families for your help and treat donations!

Our fun-filled days wouldn't be complete without visits from our yoga, Chinese, and Spanish teachers. This week we had to say goodbye to our Spanish teacher and dear friend, Ms. Daphne. Our Bluebonnets wanted to do something very special for her so they decorated a flag and presented it as part of their farewell after our last final Spanish lesson with her.  She absolutely loved it!  We will all miss her very much!

Our Friday finished with a spooky and spectacular Halloween party!!!! Our Sprouts got decked out in their costumes, practiced trick-or-treating throughout the school, played with some Halloween hay and pumpkins, and finished off the week with a special Halloween parade!  We look forward to continuing our celebration of the autumn season over the next few weeks!

Have a wonderful and peaceful week!

Love,
Jodie