In effort to help keep us flu-free, monitor your children at home and please do not bring them to school with a fever (or if they have been running a fever within the last 24 hours).  Additionally, please watch for other warning signs, such as sore throats, achy bodies, extreme fatigue, vomiting, diarrhea, or general change in behavior.  Do not hesitate to vaccinate children with both the flu shot and the H1N1 vaccine as well.  We are offering employees incentives to get their shots to help on our end!  Additionally, you should have received the flyer we sent home about the free flu clinics from the Health Department.  If you have the flu, please ring the bell and we will bring your children in or out so you don’t have to worry about coming in and possibly spreading germs.  Thanks for all your help with this! 

From Our Reading Specialist

On Tuesday, November 3rd, wearing reading hats that proudly displayed their names, the Pre-kindergarten classes read Chrysanthemum, by Kevin Henkes, a book that celebrates the uniqueness and specialness of everyone’s name. Student names drawn from the Name Jar were used for a literacy development activity. Each name was written vertically and as a class, words selected that began with the same letters of the students’ names were written and later read together.  Throughout the weeks each child will have their name selected from the Name Jar and used to enhance early literacy development as they continue to make associations between letters and sounds.

Financial Memo

Need to extend your day?  Need to add a day to your schedule?  No problem!  We offer Drop in care for currently enrolled families.  See your director for these additional services.

New tuition rates take effect on November 27, 2009.  Copies of the new rates are located at the front desk.

Attention Early Bird Shoppers.  Sign up for the Elf Club each Friday evening in November and get your shopping done early this year.  See the front desk for more information.

What’s Cooking?!?!?

PUMPKIN CAKE

Ingredients
2 cups sugar
1.25 cup vegetable oil
1tsp. vanilla extract
2 cups canned pumpkin
4 eggs
2 cups all purpose flour
3 tsp. baking soda
0.25 tsp salt
2 tsp. ground cinnamon
1 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

1.) Preheat Oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour a 12X18 inch pan.  Sift together baking soda, salt and cinnamon.  Set Aside.
2.) In a large bowl, combine sugar and oil. Blend in vanilla and pumpkin then beat in eggs, 1 at a time.  Gradually beat in flour mixture.  Stir in nuts.  Spread batter into pan.
3.) Bake for 30 minutes.

CLASS NOTES

 Pelican- Ms. Sue and Ms. Meredith

      The Pelicans had a great first week of November.  We have especially enjoyed our new cardboard books from the book fair!  Thanks for the donations; they have been a hit!  “A Cuddle for Little Duck” is definitely a class favorite.  It is about a little duck that loves to spend the day playing in the meadows and ponds with her friends and then enjoys the comforts of going home to her mom to cuddle before going to sleep.  Outside of literature, we have also been working on speaking some basic words. Ms. Sue and Ms. Meredith have been singing hello and goodbye, trying to get our friends to echo.  Maegan was great at playing right along!   Stacking and knocking down large stacks of blocks was a favorite for our two guys, Jackson and Gray, this week.  Meanwhile, Sami and Ashlyn are moving quickly and working to see how many toys they can get in their hands at a time!  The highlight for everyone seems to be hiding and sitting in the cubbies; great fun with classroom furniture!!  Thanks for a great week and we look forward to seeing you on Monday!  Have a great weekend!

                              
Kangaroos- Ms. Jen and Ms. Kim

 This week the Kangaroos had a great time making patterns with shapes, animal sounds and our favorite colors. We have been learning about our five senses as well.  We love to play with our scent bottles.  We get to see them, feel them, squeeze them, smell them, and they sometime even make a little sound too!  We also used our sight to play a few games of “I Spy”.  The kids loved this!  Try it at home!  We enjoyed this game both in and outside!  During humanities, we put on of our very own puppet plays!  During this activity we got to share and worked on building friendships, a theme of this week!   Although it is getting a bit chillier outside, we are still getting to enjoy a little time on our playground.  We love watching our ball roll down the hill and tossing them back to the top, only to watch them roll again:).  Have a great weekend and thank you again for making this year’s book fair such a great success.  We are enjoying our new books and earned some free ones too! 

 Peacock- Ms. Lee

 Hello Peacock families and friends, we hope everyone had a great time trick or treating on Halloween!  We really enjoyed our parties and special activities that went on at school last Thursday and Friday!  As we kicked off November, we have had a lot of fun learning about colors!  We have been coloring, painting and creating tissue paper art while learning!   We also enjoyed learning to count to ten in Spanish!  Throughout the week we discussed our 5 senses during group circle time.  We did a smell and touch test where the children could not see the object and had to guess what they thought it was based on what their senses were telling them.  That was so much fun!  The letter of the week was “X” so we made X-ray paintings and also played our Xylophone during group time!  We are having a great time learning in the peacock room this year!  See you Monday- stay warm!!

Bunny- Ms. Whitney
 

The Bunnies had a wonderful week!  We learned about color and shape patterns.  We had a lot of fun making our own patterns and Riley and Martin were really good at figuring out what shape or color would come next!  We also discovered our 5 senses this week.  We learned the corresponding body parts for each sense and had a lot of fun testing our senses.  Addie and Nathan liked testing their sight and Lucas liked testing his hearing!  For social awareness we discussed friendship.  We discovered ways to be a good friend and talked about the things we should never do to our friends.  Emily and Makayla enjoyed learning about friendship.  The Bunnies also discovered Spanish this week!  We learned how to say hello, goodbye, please and thank you.  We learned how to count to 6 in Spanish too!  Thank you for a great week and have a wonderful weekend!

Walrus- Ms. Erin

 Welcome November!  The Walrus class enjoyed all of the recent Halloween festivities and some of us even got to share the special events with our loved ones!  We picked pumpkins from the “Bright Beginnings Pumpkin Patch”, trick or treated at the doctors office and had a costume party with lots of yummy treats!  In math we played a floor shape game where we had to recognize and locate one of our shape friends to stand on.  This activity worked on our shape recognition skills and we got some exercise too!  In science we made pinecone, peanut butter birdfeeders.  We collected pinecones, made a peanut butter/birdseed mixture and rolled the pinecones through the sticky bird treat.  We took our birdfeeders outside and hung them on a tree that we can see through our window.  Sam watched throughout the day to see if any birds were snacking on our treat we cooked up for them.  We worked on our graphing skills by making a costume and favorite candy graph.  We also made orange playdough which we created by measuring our ingredients, stirring them together and cooking them in the microwave.  Ava Jordan and Cate were super helpers and checked the consistency each time to see if it had reached its full playdough “doughiness”.  In art we made paper bag pumpkins, Halloween sparkle pictures and witches hats!  In social awareness we discussed what makes us feel safe.  Take a look below for our answers!  In children’s humanities we used Encarta for kids to research things we wanted to learn more about.  We looked up tigers, music, painting and bats!  We’re not only learning how to use the computer but also how it can help us expand our knowledge on so many different things!  Have a great weekend!

“I Feel Safe When…”
“…I go to school” (Cate)
“….the leaves change” (Sam)
“….we go outside” (Bree)
“… Mom and Dad take me to the pizzeria” (Sophia)
“… Mom buckles me in” (Ava Jordan)
“… I’m with my family” (Lucy)
 

Reminders & Information:  Thanks to all of the parents who helped out with the Halloween celebrations; we had a blast thanks to you!  Please send in a container of Clorox/Lysol disinfectant wipes when you can; we’re trying to keep ourselves healthy this season!

 Rooster – Ms. Amanda

      In math this week, we worked on graphing.  We made graphs of our favorite colors and scents.  In science, the Roosters discussed the sense of smell and practiced recognizing and guessing different scents.  We also worked on colors, working with a color wheel and recognition.  In language arts, we began learning about a new letter of the week, “X”.  We learned a song about “X”, brainstormed words that begin with “X” and practiced writing the letter “X”. In art, the Roosters created dream catchers.  Check them out in the hallway!   We also mixed and created our own colors and painted with Kool-Aid- it smelled good!  In social studies/awareness we discussed what is friendship.  What is a friend?  How do good friends act?  We are all working on being good friends to one another.
      The highlight of our week in the Rooster Room was our cooking project!  We made a delicious trail mix using pretzels, popcorn, chex, and raisin!  Yum!  Thanks to our parents for contributing to our ingredients!  Have a great weekend and see you Monday!