November Newsletter
2017 - 2018 Academic Year
Welcome November!
All Faiths Food Bank Food Drive
During the month of November, The Cottages will be holding a food drive for the holiday season. Food that is collected during our drive will be donated to All Faiths Food Bank. Donations needed for All Faiths Food Bank are non-perishable items, preferably meals such as soups and stews. Peanut Butter is also a great item!
We are asking all Cottage families to donate food for others that are in need during this holiday season if you are able. This is such a great opportunity to talk with your child about how others are less fortunate than we are and to show the importance of giving back and paying it forward. What a great life lesson! We appreciate your support of our community service efforts and are grateful to have such generous families! Please look for the collection boxes that will be located underneath the Parent Information Board outside the office.
Fall Fundraiser
School Garden
We would like to give a huge thank you to Randi Donahue (Harper and Isla's mommy) and Bruce Saba (Harper and Isla's grandfather) for all of their help with our school garden! They have been working hard weeding, digging, and building last month. They also removed our old garden boxes and replaced the garden boxes with beautiful new ones! We are so thankful for all of their hard work and appreciative of how nice our school garden looks. Our teachers and children are super excited to get back out into the garden to see what they can grow this month!
Important Dates
- 11/11- Veteran's Day
- 11/23-11/24- TCMLC Closed in Observance of Thanksgiving Holiday
- 11/28-11/29 - Fall Portraits with PLPP
Thanksgiving Break
The Cottages will be closed Thursday, November 23rd and Friday, November 24th in observance of the Thanksgiving Holiday. We will be open on Wednesday, November 22nd as one of our hurricane make up days. We wish all of our families a Happy Thanksgiving and are so thankful for you all!
Weather Appropriate Changes of Clothes
Now that weather is starting to get cooler, we ask that you provide us with additional changes of clothing for your child. Because the weather is so unpredictable during this time of year we highly recommend bringing in items that can be layered. We suggest keeping 1 pair of shorts, 1 pair of pants, 1 short sleeved shirt, 1 long sleeved shirt, socks, underwear, and 1 sweatshirt for your child at school. Please remember to bring in additional clothing replacements as your child is sent home in the extra clothes. Thank you!
November Birthdays!
Swirling autumn leaves of orange, red and gold, November has a beauty that's easy to behold. A birthday wish for you of happiness and more, may your days be full of what you're thankful for.
Happy Birthday to all of our friends born in November!
- Ms. Kaitlyn- November 5th
- Julian D.- November 8th
- Ms. Sarah G. - November 14th
- Charlie F. - November 22nd
- Olivia M.- November 29th
Fall Portraits with Precious Little People
Say Cheeeeeeese! On Tuesday, November 28th and Wednesday, November 29th, Precious Little People Portraits will be at The Cottages for School Portraits. Be sure to check out the picture day sheet in your child’s classroom to see which day your child will be getting their picture taken. The Parent Info Board in front of the school will have the backgrounds posted that the photographers will be using.
Story Stretchers - The Giving Tree
'Once there was a tree...and she loved a little boy.'
So begins a story of unforgettable perception, beautifully written and illustrated by the gifted and versatile Shel Silverstein.
Every day the boy would come to the tree to eat her apples, swing from her branches, or slide down her trunk...and the tree was happy. But as the boy grew older he began to want more from the tree, and the tree gave and gave and gave.
This is a tender story, touched with sadness, aglow with consolation. Shel Silverstein has created a moving parable for readers of all ages that offers an affecting interpretation of the gift of giving and a serene acceptance of another's capacity to love in return.
Joey Learns the Touching Rule
On Tuesday, November 7th, the Bumblebee and Dragonfly Cottages will take part in the Joey Learns the Touching Rule presentation. Teaching awareness of personal safety rules is an important component of safety education for children. The Personal Safety and Awareness Program, a part of the Child Protection Center, is designed to help protect children by giving them basic, practical information about personal safety in a non-threatening innovative classroom presentation. The children will receive a coloring book to take home that reinforces the message of the presentation. The Personal Safety and Community Awareness Program workshop will teach the children the following personal safety guidelines.
- Private body parts are the parts covered by your bathing suit
- People should not look or touch private body parts unless it's to help keep you clean and healthy
- If someone breaks the touching rule you should say "no", get away, and tell an adult
These concepts are reinforced at an age appropriate level through discussion, movie, and storytelling.
Cricket Cottage News
Stretching and Growing
This month we will be concentrating on fine and gross motor skills. Our older friends will work on rolling over, standing, sitting up, and holding/grabbing toys. Our younger friends will focus on grasping and reaching for toys. The Crickets are growing and changing on a daily basis. Our goal is to continue to promote and encourage their independence.
Sensory Play
This month we will be continuing our sense of touch. We will introduce a variety of materials and toys for our friends to explore. Through this activity, we encourage the development of their fine motor skills as well as their eye/hand coordination.
Sign Language
During the month of November we will be teaching the babies to sign 'thank you". To sign this word, use the fingertips of a flat hand, touch lips, then hand falls forward towards the person being thanked.
Turkey Footprints
This month we will be making turkey footprints. Gobble gobble!
We are so Thankful
November is a special month of the year. It's a time of self reflection and love of family. We are so blessed with the beautiful babies in our care! We would like to add "leaves" to our tree. On these leaves, we arte asking families to write what they are thankful for. We will then add your "leaves" to our thankful tree to display.
Ladybug Cottage News
October Recap
During the month of October the children explored the fall season such as weather changing, colors of fall, and pumpkins! Also experienced a fun finger painting activity using homemade finger paints that are inspired by fall colors and scents. We read new fall books and enjoyed fall songs! The Ladybugs are really starting to effectively communicate with us and each other. We have been seeing a lot of head shakes indicating a "yes" or "no" to questions we ask the children and sign language!
Hello November!
During the month of November the children will be learning all about farms. We will explore farm animals and identify the animal by name and playing with sounds the animals make. Also fruits and vegetables grown on a farm. The children will be using items that can be found on farms such as hay, corn cobs, and "eggs" for sensory and crafts. Along with singing Old MacDonald Had a Farm.
Bathing Farm Animals
The farm animals in the classroom will be taking a bath! We will put the toy farm animals in a sensory bin with soapy water. Using sponges, the children can scrub the animals. During this activity we will be focusing on developing social and emotional skills, guiding the children as they work and play together. We will also be focusing on cognitive development as we use classification skills to sort out the animals.
Painting with Hay and Corn Cobs
The children will be enjoying some messy fun at the "farm" participating in group art activities. We will be rolling corn cobs in paint and then moving them around to make imprints on poster paper. Hay will be bunched together, tied, and used as a painting tool.
Gathering Eggs
Jennie's House will be transformed into a chicken coop! The children will help us collect and gather "chicken eggs". The children are beginning to understand object permanence (just because I can't see it doesn't mean it is not there). We thought this will be a fun experiment.
November Songs
Learning the animal sounds through the timeless classic, Old MacDonald Had a Farm.
Old MacDonald had a farm,
E-I-E-I-O.
And on his farm he had some chicks,
E-I-E-I-O.
With a chick, chick here,
And a chick, chick there,
Here a chick, there a chick,
Everywhere a chick, chick,
Old MacDonald had a farm,
E-I-E-I-O.
1. Duck - quack
2. Turkey - gobble
3. Pig - oink, oink
4. Cow - moo, moo
5. Cat -meow, meow
6. Mule - heehaw
7. Dog - bow wow
8. Horse - neigh neigh
9. Sheep - baa baa
Family Photos
We are asking each of our families to bring in a family photo. We always enjoy looking at pictures of our family while at school. If you can please bring in a family photo or email it to liz@thecottagespreschool.com. Thank you!
Caterpillar Cottage News
October Recap
Wow, we were so busy having fun and growing this month that October seemed to really fly by. The children enjoyed painting outdoors, making festive fall art creations, and having lots of opportunities for sensory play. We enjoyed spooky sensory bins, color mixing experiments, and exploration with shaving cream. Special thanks and love to Randi Donahue for the garden transformation, all the families who brought in donations for our pumpkin party, and those families who were able to attend our Pumpkin Parties celebration.
November
In the month of November we will be spending a lot of time outdoors enjoying the beautiful weather. We will be doing a nature collage, a teddy bear picnic, and outdoor art. We plan on taking nature walks to collect items for our art collage and some outside story time as well. If you would like to come in and volunteer to help with an activity or read a story, please let Ms. Ashley or Ms. Sami know.
Teddy Bear Picnic
For this special event we will ask that each child bring in a special furry friend to join us for an outdoor picnic! Sandwiches and finger foods would be ideal to pack for lunch on this day. Pizza, fruit, and a cookie are also offered through the school on Fridays for $3.00. Please let Liz know in the office Thursday afternoon if you'd like your child to have pizza on this Friday. Weather permitting, we plan on hosting this event Friday November 10th at 12pm. You are welcome to join us if you are able!
Family Photos
We want to bring a little of you into our classroom. Displaying family photos or having them available for the children to look at helps bridge the gap from school to home and reminds the children their family is important and so very special to us! Please send in a family photo or email Ms. Liz a photo at liz@thecottagespreschool.com. If you do not have a recent photo let Ms. Ashely or myself know and we would be more than happy to snap one for you at drop-off or pick up!
Attitude of Gratitude
For social and emotional growth and development we will be cultivating a thankful attitude by working on saying please and thank you and helping our friends in need. Our children already do a wonderful job of this but we would like to deepen their understanding by taking a moment to appreciate our families for packing us yummy, nutritious lunches before we eat. Also by encourage the children to think of others in small ways by letting each other go first and waiting for our classmates to get their food before we start eating ours.
Donations:
Old Muffin tins for sorting
Rope lights
Empty tin coffee cans
Butterfly Cottage News
October Sensations
October was sensory month in the Butterfly Cottage! We made two different kinds of slimes- pumpkin slime and ghost slime. Witches potion was created that included water beads, ghouls, and goblins. We made monster paintings by using straws to blow the paint all over the paper. The Butterflies also enjoyed marble painting and made jack-o-lanterns out of our art. We really enjoyed looking at each other's silly and scary jack-o-lantern faces!
November Explorations
During the month of November we will be exploring our outdoor environments now that the weather is becoming cooler. Letter recognition will continue to be encouraged as we will be doing scavenger hunts on the playground to find letters. Our Butterflies really enjoy science, so we are planning on fun experiments this month and continuing our love of sensory exploration activities. Please keep an eye in the classroom for documentation panels and check out what we did daily on our dry erase board.
Five Little Leaves
Five little leaves on the tree next door
one fell off and then there were four
Four little leaves all over the tree
a bird pulled off one and then there were three
Three little leaves where the wind blew
one fell off and then there were two
Two little leaves sitting in the sun
a bug ate and then there was one
One little leaf in the tree all alone
the wind blew and now there are none
Directions
Up, down, front, behind, high, and low, there's so many directions our friends can go! We will be working with our friends this month on spatial concepts. Our friends love the song and story, "Going on a Bear Hunt", and we will continue to use this as a great tool to add new directions to our friends vocabulary.
Name Recognition
Our friends have definitely been working hard and have gotten the first letter of their name down completely! We are so proud of them! During the month of October we started working with our Butterflies on recognizing their full names around the classroom and outside to find. We will continue to come up with more fun ways and discuss which letters our names start with and what letters we have in our names.
Thank You!
We would like to send a special thank you to our Butterfly families. We truly appreciate all the donations we receive from the wish lists. Our Butterflies have so much fun doing the activities using the new supplies!
Bumblebee Cottage News
October Recap
Exploring the start of our harvest season took center stage in October as we learned of the people and vehicles, both past and present, involved in the process of getting healthy and providing farm fresh foods to our local grocery stores. The changing of leaves was explored in a frozen leaves experiment as we melted the ice with droppers and warm water versus water with pink Himalayan sea salt added. The Bees began their journey of cultures around the world through an exploration of music and movement. November provides the continued potential to observe changes in our surroundings with shorter days and longer nights, guiding our next month's inquiries.
Letter of the Week
Moving along through our ABCs, we slowly begin to expand on the focus of letters not simply being in our and our friends' names, but in other words around us. This month we will be focusing on the letters K, L, M, and N, both capital, and lowercase, with regular recaps of our alphabet to date. We introduced the “Special Helper” stick figure to help familiarize the children with different strokes needed to create each letter of the alphabet. Utilizing both whole body movement and tracing are different ways we invite children to practice and play with budding writing skills at all levels.
Color Inquiry: Red
The Bees have buzzed through yellow, orange, and now we arrive at red! With juicy apples, leaves, and flowers, to stop signs and fire engines, inspiration abounds for a closer look at this primary color. Many will be tickled "pink" when they mix red and white. Undoubtedly, browns may be detected with red and black, supporting language and communication skills as we continue to develop our inner artists.
Fine Arts: Artist of the Month
Exploration of artistic media is welcomed and free expression is encouraged. However, did you know that some children become frustrated, even discouraged from exploring the arts when they are not granted enough guidance? For this reason, we will be introducing an artist of the month. We will begin by discussing their artistic style which will be modeled for the children with an invitation to play with this new style. However, this will add another gateway into social studies as we learn about some of the places where each artist was born. Problem-solving skills, another skill integral to later school success, will be nourished through these inquiries. November's artist of the month will be Claude Monet, with a closer look at his utilization of red swatches in his painting Poppy Field in Argenteuil.
Autumn Changes
Continuing to observe autumn changes in our environment will guide many of this month's invitations. Changes can be seen in the migration of birds, the longer and earlier evenings, and even in science-based experiments! Use of fall-inspired natural loose parts to create and to explore, such as leaves and acorns, will provide a world of mathematical and scientific explorations. Home and harvest will be a topic to center upon as our Bees will note the excited and growing bustle of delicious foods prepared and families and friends visiting around this time of year. This is only the beginning!
Apple Pie Recipe
We look forward to continued development of math and scientific inquiry skills, not to mention healthful eating habits, through a monthly culinary experience. This month, our focus will be on a vegan apple pie, which should satisfy all our Bees' palettes. This is, in addition, to carefully including ingredients that should be good for all dietary needs. When we make our own food, we get to learn not only how ingredients and the heating process changes our food, but we are in control of the amount of added sugars, making it possible for even sweet treats to be good for us! Our donations request list will be posted next to the sign-in sheet. Happy Autumn, indeed!
Dragonfly Cottage News
October Recap
October was filled with so much fun! We had a blast learning all about pumpkins, pinecones, and Autumn! We loved collecting various Autumn findings on the playground and creating leaf people letters with sticks and patterns. W are really working hard on letters, letter sounds, and phonological awareness.
November News
November will be a month of inquiry on farms, growing crops, and being thankful. We will be adding to our thankful tree and will be asking for family pictures. We would love to start planting in the school garden beds this month as well.
Literacy Provocations
We will be doing a lot of simple literacy provocations throughout the next couple of weeks to help strengthen our letter recognition and letter sounds. Writing words, poems, and lists also help with these skills. We will be working on creating our own books and using a lot of various items to build letters and explore letters in our environment to inspire a love of learning!
Cooking
We are excited to make yummy pumpkin muffins in the Dragonfly Cottager this month. The children will work together as chefs using their social skills to communicate ingredient measuring and number identification on the measuring cups. Please keep your eye out as we will be posting a signup sheet on the parent board asking for donations for our cooking activity.
Math Concepts
We are learning and growing with our math concepts in the Dragonfly Cottage. We all love to be mathematicians! During the next few weeks we will be counting everything we can get our hands on. We will be providing a lot of inviting ways to create opportunities to see numbers and number values. Playful inquiry will be created by using materials that we are interested in to make math fun.
Music and Movement
Namaste! Our little yogis will be practicing a Fall Focus Yoga Flow this month. Our first pose will be Warrior 3 (bird flying south for the winter). Our next pose will be Squat pose (pretend to be squirrels collecting acorns). Our last pose will be Child's Pose (pretending to be a pumpkin in a pumpkin patch).
Science Experiments and Sensory Exploration
What happens to pinecones when you put them in water? The children will be discovering the answer to this question during one of our science experiments this month. We will also be exploring our senses by adding pumpkin spice to one of our favorite sensory projects- moon sand! This is a great way for children to calm their bodies as well as use their imagination in creating different objects.