Experienced Quality Child Care Since 1984

www.brightbeginningsva.com

Bright Beginnings Preschool

Babble

January 10th-14th, 2011

Upcoming Events:

Jan. 21 Children’s Night Out – “Winter Solstice”

5:30 – 8:30pm

Feb. 4 Children’s Night Out – “Roses are Red…”

5:30 – 8:30pm

Feb. 11 Grandparents & Special Friends Day/Sweetheart Brunch

Feb. 14 Valentine’s Day Party (see classroom signup sheets)

Feb. 18 Children’s Night Out – “Circus Time”

5:30 – 8:30pm

                        Financial Memo:

^. Our Tax ID # is: 54-1529854

Year End Summaries for tax purposes will be printed within the next week. Look for these in your child’s cubby.

Be sure to submit new credit card information when your card expires.

For the health of all the children in our care and for our staff, we ask that children be symptom free without medication for 24 hours following illness before returning to school. The symptoms referred to are diahhrea, vomiting, fever, and any severe cold symptoms. Thank you for helping us maintain healthy environment for allJ

Reminder: We close promptly at 6:00pm.

A fee of $3.00 per minute will be charged for children picked up between 6:00 – 6:15 pm for full day schedules, after 12:30-1:00 pm for half day schedules or infants and toddlers before 7:30 am and after 5:30pm. After 6:15pm the late pick up charge is $5.00 per minute.

Director’s Note:

Happy New Year! I hope everyone and all your families had a happy and safe holiday season. As nice as it was to spend quality time with our family and friends, it is great to have the kids back! We missed them! We would like to take this opportunity to welcome Ms. Danielle back to the Penguin Class. She is a valuable member of our team and all her hard work and effort is appreciated. Stephanie Corral has moved into the position of Ms. Michelle’s assistant in the Dolphin Class to support with all the daily activities. Stephanie Davis can now be found in the Starfish Class supporting Ms. Shanna with her busy group of two year olds. We appreciate all the staff’s flexibility and hard work. We would also like to introduce Ms. Erin Patterson to the Seal Class. She is busy getting to know the children and establishing consistent expectations and learning opportunities. Ms. Bre will be joining Ms. Patrice in our Walrus class on January 24^th. We are excited to have her join the team. We wish Ms. Missy well with all she pursues and we look forward to her subbing for us in the future!

What a great team to be a part of!

Hello again Sea Turtles and Penguins! It has been a great week here at Bright Beginnings! For our social studies this week we worked in the kitchen. We pretended to cook on the stove, practiced pouring drinks, and setting the table. We had a class picnic on Thursday and on Friday we made snickerdoodles! For our math and science this week, we continued to review our shapes, colors, opposites and body parts. We also continued to work on counting and practiced counting in Spanish this week. They continue to progress and it is so impressive to see how much they improve in just a week’s time. Quiz them at home and you can see for yourselves how well they are doing with these subjects! This week in the gross motor room we did some balancing exercises. They would try to stand on one foot, touch their toes, and walk on a line. Little activities like these are great ways to help develop their gross motor skills and the children really enjoy doing them. We also practiced bowling, worked with scarves by throwing them into the air and tried catching them before they fell, and played “Up it Goes” with the parachute and a ball. For our art and humanities we made handprint mittens, decorated a snowman, made coffee filter snowflakes, snowflake headbands, and a footprint penguin. We also made a brush painting, an ink blot painting, a marble painting, and a car track painting. Our featured books this week were “What if?” by Laura Vaccaro Seeger, “Bear Goes Shopping” by Harriet Ziefert and Arnold Lobel, “The Little Dump Truck” by Margery Cuyler, and “Curious George Visits the Zoo” by Margaret and H.A. Reys. The children’s favorite book this week was “Potty Time” by Guido Van Genechien. They absolutely loved this book; I could not read it enough times! All of the Sea Turtles are working on potty training at the moment and they loved seeing Joe and all of his animal friends working on it as well. If anyone needs a good potty book at home, this is the one! Not only is it a fun read, it really gets the children wanting to sit on the potty! We hope everyone has a great weekend! We look forward to seeing everyone again on Monday!

Ms. Ashley and Ms. Danielle J

First, I would like to welcome Ms. Stephanie D., Gareth, and Andrew to the class. We love making new friends and all have fit right in. Our Starfish class focused on new skills as we start the new year by counting to 10 on our fingers and practicing the Alphabet on the magnet easel. We worked on our fine motor skills by stacking and counting blocks and sorting. We continued to work on our manners by practicing “no thank-you,” “thank-you,” and “please.” We  focused on shapes and colors by identifying these using familiar items in the room. “What shape is the door?” “What color is my friend_______ wearing?” We made Winter hats, paintd with ice cubes and watercolors, and created a winter scene out of tissue paper. We look forward to a busy week next week. Have a great weekend.

Ms. Shanna and Ms. Stephanie

.Happy New Year! Welcome back Ming Ming. We all missed you but are so glad to have you back from your extended holiday. We have opened our new year by learning how to cooperate as a group and work together and independently. We have been working on good choices, class rules, and listening ears. Our focus in art was the letter “T.” we made the letter using pipe cleaners and foam pieces and decorated a collage tree as a group. During circle we talked about words that begin with the letter “T.” We will continue to focus on our fine motor skills and communication as we enter the New Year. We have a new potty/diaper chart in case I am unavailable at pick up so you can see how your child’s day went. Meet the teacher is scheduled for Monday afternoon from 4:30 to 5:30. I look forward to speaking to you all. It will be a great opportunity to learn specific ways that I can meet your child’s needs.

Ms. Erin

This week in the Dolphin Class, we talked about the letter “T,” circles, the number 10, and the color black. We have introduced daily homework that consists of simple questions that review what we learned throughout the day. The children really enjoy the homework as it keeps them involved in the class activities by sharing what they did the night before. We appreciate all of your support. Project green is a topic we discuss every Wednesday. This week the Dolphins came up with great ideas for recycling. Starting Monday the 17^th, we will be showing the students how to recycle by incorporating the activity in our classroom. The school will be having a shoe drive as another fun way to recycle. Once again, we appreciate all of the wonderful support we have gotten from our parents. We could not do all of this without you.

Ms. Michelle and Ms. Stephanie

Welcome to a wonderful 2011! This week we talked about the country of Sudan. We learned that it is on the continent of Africa and borders the Red Sea. We discussed their language, their culture, and viewed their flag. The children enjoyed our discussion about penguins so much last week that we continued to learn more about them as well. For letters this week we did our Ready reader entitled “A Bath,” practiced our sight words, completed a Clifford magazine entitled “Act like a Penguin,” and practiced the letter “T” and “t” words in our Journals. For math, we played number Bingo, drew shapes in our journals, had a shape hunt, and worked with puzzles. For Project green, we talked about energy efficiency in the kitchen. Art was all about winter! We made polar bears, snowflakes, and painted igloos.

Notes- Our treasure box is in great need of new treasures. Any donations would be greatly appreciated.

Ms. Missy and Ms. Patrice

I would also once again like to say Thank-you to all the parents for allowing me to teach your children. I will greatly miss every one of them as well as all of you!

Miss Missy