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This week, we are so excited to talk about Busy D, our Pre-K program for 4 ½ – 5 year olds. Miss Emily is the teacher in this classroom! Miss Emily graduated from UCCS with a degree in Early Childhood Education. She loves play-based learning, and has been running marathons since she graduated from high school.

Busy D has been working on science as of late, growing their own crystals and observing them throughout their growth. A long-term experiment like this teaches patience over time, because you do not see results overnight. Busy D’s kiddos did observations of their crystals frequently, recording data and drawing what they saw. Some crystals grew successfully, while others did not grow at all. Sometimes experiments turn out, and some do not – but the processes and successes taught us a lot!

Up next for Busy D is the topic of dinosaurs. Every morning all of our preschool rooms come together in Busy C, and they are studying dinosaurs. Busy D thought the topic sounded really interesting, and want to learn about them too! We are excited to see what learning explorations they will experience. Check them out creating dinosaur skeletons using q-tips, glue, and black paper dinosaur cutouts in these photos!

This week we will be highlighting Toddling B, a classroom for 24 to 36 month old children. Our teachers in this classroom are Miss Renee and Miss Jasmine. Miss Renee moved to Colorado one month ago from California, and has been working in childcare for 6 years. She loves hiking and spending time with her family. Miss Jasmine has been working in childcare for 5 years. She loves watching movies, hiking, and traveling. Our kiddos are gaining independence at this age, and doing lots of things on their own.

Toddling B has been working hard on exciting fall process art. Check out our fall trees in the hallway – we used brown paper trunks, cotton balls, glue, and eye droppers full of paint to create these trees. We utilized our fine motor skills and creativity to work on gluing, pasting, squeezing, and dropping.

Another multi-day project Toddling B is working on this week deals with leaves. They explored leaves through senses of smell and touch, then used motor skills to squeeze glue onto paper, and glue on the leaves. The next step will be painting over the leaves. This will be an interesting sensory experience with painting over the leaves. It is slightly similar to the leaf rubbings (which you can also see hanging in the classroom) that Tod B did last week by rubbing crayons over leaf pattern sheets. We are so thrilled by Toddling B’s classroom structure and creative learning experiences.

To continue building our wonderful community of families and classrooms, we will be writing weekly to highlight one of our wonderfully unique classrooms!

This week, we begin with Wads B – Miss Julia and Miss Katie! Miss Julia is our lead teacher and recently graduated with a bachelor’s degree from UCCS in psychology. She has been with Little Sprouts since May and loves art, such as painting and crafting! Miss Katie is our assistant teacher and has been with Little Sprouts since July. She has worked with children for seven years and loves fall, reading, and music.

Wads B works with ages 18 months to 24 months and focuses on developing social skills, establishing friendships, and helping children expressing themselves while encouraging them to become more vocal, and working together to improving language skills.

One new addition to the Wads B routine has been reading time during transitions, such as going from indoor play to outdoor play or from indoor play to meal times. This short reading time helps the children see themselves as readers, as well as increase literacy skills. Transitions are hard, and this pleasant time helps lower stress, and get children into a routine.

Wads B has also taken the information given by parents in their parent questionnaire to make an awesome display outside of their classroom – check it out and get to know the students in Wads B! Also outside of the classroom is an awesome display of sensory and motor exploration – painting our table! We mixed colors together to see what they would create, and had a great time doing it. Check out their work in the hallway!