What a FUN first week of school! 💛 We welcomed new friends and spent the week getting to know one another. We’re already settling into our routines and having a great time learning together!
Take a peek at a few highlights from our first week! ✏️😊

The countdown is on, school starts in just one week! We can't wait to welcome back our returning friends and meet all of the new friends who will be joining us this year.
We're looking forward to a year filled with learning, laughter, new discoveries, and lots of fun. We hope everyone enjoys these last days of summer, and we can't wait to see all of your smiling faces soon!
It's going to be a fantastic year!

Today we worked in our fine motor journals using stickers and shapes! 

Grasshoppers communicate by rubbing their wings or legs together and making sounds. They can jump twenty times the length of their bodies. They prefer dry, open habitats with lots of grass, like forests or jungles. ​ Today they made adorable grasshopper handprints!

Did you know ants are very social insects? They live in big colonies with millions of other ants. A single ant can carry fifty times its own body weight. Ants work together to move very big objects.
​Anthills are piles of soil, sand and sometimes pine needles. Anthills have many chambers which are used for nurseries, storing food and even as resting places for the worker ants. During this Invitation to Create, the children experimented with a 3D shape and discovered how to use it in their anthill artwork. They used a cone, paint, sand, and glue to create these amazing anthills. 

Today we read The Itsy Bitsy Spider and talked about the sequence of events in the nursery rhyme. The kiddos practiced putting the story in order by coloring, cutting, and pasting their own sequencing activity to show what happened first, next, and last. This helped build listening, comprehension, and early literacy skills while having fun with a familiar favorite!
For math, the children explored patterns using counting cubes. They practiced recognizing, creating, and extending simple patterns while also strengthening counting and problem-solving skills. Great job, kiddos!

Today we learned some fun facts about spiders! Did you know spiders are arachnids, not insects? That’s because spiders have only two body segments and eight legs, while insects have three body segments and six legs. We also discovered that, on average, it takes a spider about an hour to spin its web; how amazing is that?
The kiddos had so much fun creating their very own spiders! First, they painted paper plates to make the spider bodies. While the paint dried, they practiced an important fine motor skill by folding paper back and forth to create eight spider legs. I modeled how to accordion-fold the paper, and they worked hard practicing those little hand muscles!
To continue our spider learning, the children also drew spiders in their journals, using their creativity and imagination to bring their creepy crawly friends to life. 

Today was one of those simple but absolutely magical preschool days!
We started the morning with a HUGE sheet of bubble wrap and OH MY GOODNESS… the entertainment lasted way longer than expected! 😂 Every time we thought all the bubbles were popped, more little pops kept appearing. It honestly reminded me of one of those birthday candles you can’t blow out because it just keeps relighting! The kids were giggling, stomping, jumping, and having the best time listening for every last pop. 
Of course, we couldn’t leave out the youngest member of our crew, so he got his own little piece too and thought it was the greatest thing ever! ❤️ (And FULL DISCLOSURE before anyone comes at me, he was 100% closely supervised the entire time while playing with the bubble wrap. 😊) As one parent stated, you can have all the toys in the world but nothing compares to packing supplies! 
After all the popping fun, we moved on to painting our names. Then came my favorite part of the day, open-ended art! I handed each child a blank sheet of paper with NO directions, NO expectations, and told them they could use the leftover paint to create absolutely anything they wanted.
The results were amazing. Every single painting was unique, colorful, creative, and beautiful in its own way. I love seeing their personalities shine through their artwork when there are no “rules” and they can simply create freely. 🎨
Such a fun-filled day full of laughter, creativity, sensory play, and imagination!