This Week in the Maple Room

Children’s Holiday celebration

December is usually a frenetic time for many adults as they prepare for the holidays. Young children are very aware of the excitement in the air. As guides, we would like to ignore the exuberance that surfaces in the classroom, but we found that it is more constructive to channel the children’s excitement into purposeful activities.

This year we will take the children on a whirlwind tour of holiday customs around the world. The children will make a menorah for Hanukkah, create St. Lucia wreaths, and place their shoes in a line for St. Nicholas day.

The children will also create gifts for their parents and wrap them all by themselves. They will collectively glue a piñata in preparation for the Los Posada and Christmas party. We place little treasures into the piñata and the children each take a turn to break it open.

The party will take place on the last day before winter break. On that day the children can bring a small present for their classroom. This custom has evolved at CGM. Rather than exchanging gifts with each other, (including teachers) the children give a small gift that can be used by the entire classroom community. The children enjoy opening their presents and eventually seeing them used in the classroom. It becomes their contribution to their classroom community. This year the piñata party will be on Dec.19^th.

Warm Hands * Warm Hearts

For the next few weeks, we will continue our emphasis on thankfulness and giving to others.  We will be collecting new mittens and gloves to donate to a local charity.  This is a great opportunity for you and your child to talk about helping others and the joy of giving.

Look for our special clothesline to hang the mittens/gloves on in our reception area.  Thank you so much for all your support, CGM has awesome children and parents.

During this season of giving, we request that in lieu of holiday gifts for the teachers, anyone interested in purchasing a gift, may focus on gifts for the classroom community !

 Look for a wish list to be posted soon!

Important dates :

Dec. 6^th—St. Nicholas Day

Dec. 13^th.—St Lucia Day.

Dec.17^th—Hanukkah.

Dec. 19^th –Christmas Party.

As always, all children are welcome to join in, on these days, even if it is not your attending day !

This Week in the Maple Room

In the Maple room, we have been quite engaged with activities to continue learning about continents, fall harvesting and getting ready for celebrations. Many children are focused on lengthy works and seem to be progressing well.

We decided to have a Thanksgiving fruit salad for our own  Thanksgiving celebration on Wednesday the 21^st. Each one of us will be bringing in a fruit that we chose from our artificial fruit basket. The info slip will be found in their cubbies. Please send in the fruit on Tuesday or Wednesday next week. The children will be washing, cutting and arranging the salad, so NO preparation is needed at home.

We will also make a dessert—a no bake pumpkin cheese cake to go with our fruit salad, on Tuesday the 20^th.

The ingredients are – pumpkin, cream cheese, brown sugar (some of course!) cool whip, and graham crackers. I did not see any child being allergic to these ingredients in my records. Please let me or Jama know if there is a concern.

Pratyush, Laasya and Anaya’s Moms (Pavitra ,Kavita and Alpa) gave us a presentation for Diwali. It was an awesome experience for us. The children got to experience the lovely skit about the story of Diwali, acted out by Arhan, Pratyush and Laasya. Pavitra brought several novelties from home to share with us.

They brought in snacks to taste, costumes to try out and music to dance to. Thank you to all the volunteers for providing this extraordinary experience for our children.

We made some Diwali lights (diyas) from clay and decorated them. We lighted the one that Ms. Jama made with a handmade wick and coconut oil, for silence today.

We are looking forward to celebrating Thanksgiving and then many more holidays in the weeks to come.

Children need to get out and play and get their energy out and build a strong immune system. We will be out for 15 minutes in the morning 9-9:15 am and then 11:40-12:00, as long as the weather permits and it is above 37 degrees.

As per the Old Scandinavian saying and  Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes:

“There is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing.”

We will try to bundle up our children as best as we can.

This Week in the Maple Room

The children had a great time with the costumes on October 31^st.  Each one of them stood in the middle of the group to display their costume with pride! We had a group snack and had our own music band parade in the classroom. It was so much fun to create a lot of noise/music together!!

We learned about the human skeleton and parts of a spider in the spirit of the month of October. The painting of their hand to make a spider was a great hit.

We will continue to study about the earth and the continents. Next we will be exploring North America along with stories, crafts and songs about Thanksgiving.

As always at CGM, we strive to let our children experience the value of giving to those in need.  We will be accepting nonperishable food items to be donated to a local food pantry. The elementary children have set a goal for us. We would like to donate 180 food items. Each family is requested to  bring in three canned, boxed or packed items, if possible.

The items need to be collected by the 15^th of November. The elementary class will take them to the donation center on the 16^th.

This week in the Maple Room

Thank you to our volunteers that have come in and helped. We have enjoyed the home-made snacks sent by you, very yummy. The huge zucchini has been carried around the room a lot. It’s now being washed as an activity. When the children are ready we will cut it. The children enjoyed watching the loofah sponge come out from the loofah, which looked just like the zucchini. Apple crafts were quite popular this week. We used apples as stamps and made apples out of paper plates.

We have been singing the fall harvesting song—“oats peas beans and barley grow”. Ask your child to sing it for you. I brought in some pictures of the grains and the plants. We were talking about how the oat and barley ears looked similar and I offered the question-“I wonder how bread is made?”

Patrick –”It is made out of meat.”

Danny – “You mean wheat?”

Patrick – “No, I know it is made of meat.”

We have been learning about our bodies and soon will learn about the human skeleton. Just in time for Halloween!

Halloween at CGM

If your child wishes, s/he may wear a costume to school on Wednesday October 31st. When choosing a costume, please consider that some costumes may be frightening to other children, especially masks, so they are not welcome! Weapons are unacceptable. Please make sure children have a change of clothes, as they may want to get out of their costume. If weather permits, we will parade in the costumes to the library. Otherwise we will have our parade inside.

If your child does not attend on Wednesdays they are most welcome to come in and join the fun! We would, however, prefer the parent to stay and help.

Maple Room News

Fall is officially here! The children have been very busy exploring different kinds of leaves. The leaf cabinet is being used to match, trace and cut or poke out leaves. Most children have enjoyed the easel painting.

We are excited to welcome a new student, Bradan Corbett. The children love having new friends in their classroom.

We have a great group of children that love to clean! Dusting and sweeping has been very popular.

The older children will be beginning to move into some advance work soon. We love to see their faces as they discover new concepts and feel accomplishment in themselves.

Parent teacher conferences are coming up on the 24^th. Jama and I are looking forward to share great things about your children with you soon!

This week in the Maple Room

In the Maple room, we had our first birthday celebration. Pratyush turned three and was quite amused walking around in a circle, holding the globe!

We learned about our earth. We filled jars with land, air and water. We will continue to explore the continents next. Most children have enjoyed the good weather, being outdoors in the beginning of the day and then gotten very busy inside.

We are looking forward  to bring Fall into our room, so there will be some fall visible in most areas of our room, learning about leaves, harvesting and getting ready for winter !

Just to remind you all, that if you come across some odd items while doing laundry, please send them back.

The children can bring any interesting fall items (for example- a leaf, twig, bark, pine cone, bug, rock etc.) that they find while taking a nature walk or from their yard, for show and tell. Show and tell is any day they are ready to bring something to share with their peers.

A wonder-full week

We had a great orientation week!

Shivani and I had the privilege to work with your children and get to know a little about them. Together we explored the environment, learned how to get work from the shelves, snack and water, the bathroom routine, the hand washing routine and the play yard fun.

We sang songs with everyone’s name, so we can learn names of our peers quickly. In the coming weeks we will be learning about real and artificial things, living and non-living things, parts of a plant and then leaves.

Thank you for giving us an opportunity to learn with your children!

Indu and Shivani

Welcome to Maple Room

Welcome to the Maple Room!

In the future this is where you will find postings that will be about and for the Maple Room. Parents will find messages from Ms. Indu, Ms. Shivani and it will be updated with pictures throughout the year.