This week, we were mindful of our responsibilities of keeping our environment beautiful throughout the day. The first part of the week, the children needed many reminders to replace their chairs, sweep bits of paper after their collage was finished, clean up all of the water at handwashing, etc. By Thursday, we noticed these reminders were fewer. By Friday, children were noticing paint on the watercolor tray themselves and cleaning it before they began their own painting. It is amazing the effect that modeling care and conscious movement has on young children. This work will continue each day, and the goal is to practice these habits with the knowledge that it is an ebb and flow; as in life at home, some days the children remember and others they need reminders.
Halloween is coming up, and the children are quite excited. We don't have Halloween activities at school, but we celebrate the change of the seasons with some art activities that become available to the children. We also sing some songs about fall and recite fall poems.
It's fun to see the excitement on the children's faces leading up to Halloween, and there is lots of discussion about costumes. As far as school policy goes, we don't dress up for Halloween at school. Please help your child to keep their wardrobe consistent with the rest of the year for school. It can be quite distracting when children wear clothes that have scary images of ghosts, skeletons, or scary jack-o-lanterns, for example.
We welcome small pumpkins to decorate our room, so if your child would like to bring one, we'd love it!
Please send a fresh fruit or veggie for your child's snack. It's just meant to be a bit of nourishment to tide them over until lunchtime. They usually have their snack during the 9:00 hour, then we have lunch at 11:30, so it's not a very big gap. If your child is coming home with lots of food in their lunchbox, it might be because they had too large of a snack.
I am looking forward to Conference Day, this Monday, October 23. Please remember that school is closed that day and there is no childcare available.
Have a lovely weekend!
Best Regards,
Kate and Laura
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