The Bugs Buzz

The Bug’s Buzz

April 2017

From the Director’s Desk:

With the school year flying by, please remember to check your child’s book bag and the teacher information boards for important dates and reminders of upcoming events. There are a lot of activities happening between now and the end of the school year, and many forms are being sent home in the coming weeks. Some of the highlights include Spring Pictures, Mother’s Tea, end of the year celebrations & special days, and of course the end of the year family picnic on May 18th. Let’s hope Mother Nature cooperates for all of these special preschool days.

If your child tells you this month that he/she made a butterfly to help decorate a park, they are correct! SPP is sponsoring (decorating) a few trees for the Butterfly Walk and 5K benefitting CancerFree Kids. The trees along the route in Cottell Park will be beautifully decorated with hundreds of butterflies. If you are participating, be sure to look for the SPP trees. If you would like additional information on the event, please visit: www.butterflywalk.com

Happy Spring!

Jamie Coston

A Note from the Parent’s Auxiliary:

Hello Families:

Spring is finally here! We hope you are able to enjoy the nice weather that we are sure to have this month.

We wanted to thank you all again for attending our Pizzeria Locale event at the end of February. The final numbers are in and Pizzeria Locale donated $480 to our preschool-WOW! It was such a great turn out and we are thankful for local businesses that support our school!

We had a great time at Mom's Zoo Night. The zoo was a huge hit and we know the children enjoyed the interactions with the animals. A huge thank you to all of the dad's who volunteered to make this a great event. We appreciate you!

We just wrapped up our first Usborne Book Fair. The preschool received $150 in books from the sale! Thank you for your support and thank you to Dave Pattison for organizing this great event.

Coming up on Sunday, April 30th from 4:00 PM-8:00 PM we will have another Spirit Night at Chipotle on Mason Montgomery Road. The preschool will receive 50% of each order when Sycamore Presbyterian Preschool is mentioned. We will be distributing flyers in April for this great event.

We need your help! We are looking for one or two individuals to serve as co-chairs of the Parent's Auxiliary with Dave Pattison and Kristy Felss next year. Dave and Kristy will be the lead chairs but they need one or two co-chairs. If you are interested or have questions about the position, please email Kristin Schmitt () or Katie Rhoads ().

More fun events to come in May, stay tuned!

Kindly-

The SPPPA Team (Kristin, Katie, and Dave)

Mark Your April Calendars:

Spring Pictures-April 3-Busy Bee, Ladybug, Marching Ant

April 4-AM Wiggle Worm, Butterfly, AM Dragonfly

April 6-PM Wiggle Worm & PM Dragonfly

*there will be no group (class) picture

*plan for pictures no matter what the weather-she will photograph the children

if at all possible-cloudy weather makes for better pictures!

Speech/Language Screenings-week of April 3

Chapel Praise-Tuesday, April 4 & Wednesday, April 5

Spring Break-April 10-17 No School (school resumes on Tuesday, April 18)

SPP Spirit Night at Chipotle-Sunday, April 30 4:00-8:00pm *additional info to follow

Looking Ahead to May…

Mother’s Tea-week of May 8 (during class)-dates/times will be provided by classroom teachers

-please remember that siblings (including infants) are not permitted

Last Days of School-May 16 & May 17

Family Picnic-Thursday, May 18 11:00-1:00

-Home of the Brave Park in Symmes Township

-all family members are welcome to attend

-details provided closer to the event

News from the Classrooms

Busy Bees

Buzz, Buzz, Buzz...In March, the Busy Bees we running at full steam as we learned about many Things That Go! We loved painting our egg carton trains. Also, we pretended how high in the air we could go in a hot air balloon. We would love to be able to fly like birds. Right before St. Patrick’s Day the Busy Bees had a mystery to solve. A sneaky and mischievous leprechaun messed up our classroom by turning chairs upside down and sprinkling coins and shamrocks all over the place. We created a foolproof trap to catch this silly leprechaun, but he was just too fast for us! But we’ll be keeping watch for him next year on St. Patrick’s Day. To wrap up the month, we began studying about Spring and all the things that change during this time of year. We designed and painted beautiful windsocks to hang at our homes. The wind can blow the streamers all around. We also made butterflies and tulips with pretty spring colors to decorate the hallway. The Busy Bees are getting bigger by the day and we keep spreading our wings wide! Buzz, Buzz, Buzz…

Mrs. Donovan & Mrs. Stine

Wiggle Worms

Hooray! Spring has sprung! Now that we will (hopefully) have warmer weather from here on out, please check the extra clothes kept in your child’s schoolbag to be sure the clothes are weather appropriate. We started last month off by celebrating Dr. Seuss week. The kids really enjoyed his books, and we worked on learning about rhyming words. They think it is very funny when we do the “Name Game” song and use their names to rhyme. Our enrichment was a presentation on Johnny Appleseed. The children especially enjoyed the puppet show and songs. Our transportation unit inspired the kids to gather up chairs from the classroom into a line to pretend they were traveling on a bus or airplane. Now that they know each other well, they have developed strong friendships and love to engage in group play. They are a loving group of kids and we enjoy seeing their social skills develop. As we look ahead to April, our next units will be learning about Spring, Easter, and nature.

Mrs. Partin & Mrs. Stelmack

Butterflies

We had great fun last month becoming authors and illustrators. We used our imaginations and wrote our very own books!

The Butterfly Class had fun celebrating St Patrick's Day! We built a Leprechaun trap, but... that mischievous fellow got away and really messed up our room in the process! Later in the month, our classroom magically turned into a rainforest! The children loved learning about the four layers of a rainforest and about all of the animals that live there.

Spring finally arrived and we grew grass heads! We planted grass seed in cups with the children'sfaces on them.The Butterflies gave themselves a haircut with scissors! We love gardening and grew our ownbeansprouts afterreading"Billy theBean".

We had so much fun and are looking forward to our last few months of school!

Mrs. MacLeod & Mrs. Butler

Dragonflies

The Dragonflies had a fun packed month of learning. At Chapel, we learned Jesus could perform miracles. He healed the sick, the blind and he even walked on water. Our verse was “When I am afraid, I will trust in God. We learned Roy G Biv is not a person but a fun way to remember the colors in the rainbow while we were studying our weather theme. Our enrichment was Mother’s Nature presents Johnny Appleseed and it was great. The children learned all about apples, sang fun songs, and were entertained with an interactive play. The Dragonflies had lots of fun with Liam the Leprechaun as that tricky guy would hide all over our room and it was our job to find him. St. Patrick’s Day was a hit. We celebrated with green grapes, Lucky Charms, and green juice. Everyone looked so awesome in their green attire. We planted grass seed and are enjoying watching it grow during our Taking care of our Earth theme. We practiced rhyming words during our Nursery rhyme week and enjoyed the rhymes and art with it. The Dragonflies rounded out our month with talking about what lives in or around a pond.

Happy Spring,

Mrs. Miller & Mrs. Mettey

Ladybugs

March was a very busy month for the Ladybugs. We began our Camping/Forest Animal theme with painting big trees for the Camping center in our room. Forest Animals were a favorite as we discussed Fox, Bear, Raccoons and many other animals that live in the Forest. We compared animal tracks and counted the rings of a section of a tree. We thought it was very cool that Bears fished for and loved to eat salmon! March weather cooperated with our theme "What’s the Weather?" and provided us with stormy, windy and rainy days. Welearnedthat the sun is really a giant star and that plants need both sun and rain in order to grow. Our St. Patrick's Day celebration was amazing with a quick "visit" from Mr. Leprechaun. He was very mischievous as he turned over chairs, left messages for us, knocked over games and threw glitter and shamrocks all over the room! The Ladybugs were all so surprised!!! Our Ladybugs refined their "artistic technique" as we created sculpture from chenille stems, studied different forms of lines and patterns, created paper "quilts" and created a group collage with a ton of plastic caps.

Spring finally decided to stay around while the Ladybugs learned about plant growth and baby animals. We also studied bees and why they are beneficial and so important to us. all year long the ladybugs have been counting daily to our 100th day of school. During this time, we have recognized recurring number patterns, recognized more double digit numbers, and counted by 10s. Our 100th day party was lots of fun and full of 100 day activities such as stacking 100 pennies and building towers with 100 cups! Happy Spring!

Mrs. Gagliardi & Mrs. DeLord

Marching Ants

The Marching Ants began March with a bang! Our week was definitely wacky as we started it with a beach in the classroom! We drew “under” the tables for Turnover Tuesday, and dressed wacky for Wacky Wednesday, of course. The week ended with pajama day and a breakfast of bagels and sausages. Yum! During our unit on "Once Upon a Time" we enjoyed the stories of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Three Billy Goats Gruff, The Princess and the Pea, and There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly. We became princes and princesses, found a pea under our sit-upons, made Billy Goat Gruff stick puppets, and brainstormed crazy things for our “old lady” to swallow. Even more fun - we each wrote our own “Once upon a time…” fairy tale stories in our writing center! As we began a week of The Rainforest, our Marching Ants cut leaves, painted butterflies and frogs, and decorated snakes to create and awesome rainforest in our classroom! The week ended with the boys and girls creating a special leprechaun trap (and a very messy classroom due to a tricky leprechaun!) Our month ended with the anticipation of springtime. We listened to Little Cloud and painted puffy clouds, read Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (and made ourselves hungry thinking of favorite foods falling from the sky) and becoming weather forecasters in our very own classroom TV/Weather pretend center. We also planted seeds, studied earthworms, and celebrated 100 days of school!

Mrs. Thomsen & Mrs. Naughton