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