JANUARY 2024
There was a chubby snowman
And he had a carrot nose.
Along came a bunny
And what do you suppose?
The hungry little bunny
Was looking for his lunch.
He grabbed that snowman’s carrot nose…
…NIBBLE! NIBBLE! CRUNCH!!
THANK YOU!
THANK YOU so much, from all the staff at St. Catherine’s, for your wonderful cards and gifts of appreciation. We do love our jobs!
SAVE THE DATE:
Meet & Greet Coffee Time Jan. 15th & 16th @ 9am
After you drop off your child, please come and join us for some coffee, tea and treats while we MEET & GREET with some of the Preschool’s board/Church members who will chat with you about the upcoming renovations of the Church and what that means for the Preschool. More info to come in the first week back to school.
| DATE | DAY | EVENT |
|---|---|---|
| JAN 8 | MON | First Day Back to Classes |
| JAN 15/16 | MON/TUE | Coffee Time Meet & Greet |
| JAN 31 | WED | Current Families Registration |
| FEB 1 | THURS | Preschool Registration 2024/25 |
| FEB 13/14 | TUE/WED | Children's Valentine's Day Parties |
| FEB 13 | TUE | Church Pancake Supper |
| FEB 16 | FRI | PRO-D DAY: PRESCHOOL CLOSED |
| FEB 19 | MON | FAMILY DAY: PRESCHOOL CLOSED |
| MAR 18-29 | 2 WEEKS | SPRING BREAK: PRESCHOOL CLOSED |
REGISTRATION: SEPTEMBER 2024
St. Catherine’s Church is planning on a major renovation project in the next couple of years that will impact our Preschool and the classrooms we use. Starting in September 2024, we will have only two classrooms available to us and so we have made the difficult decision to drop our Discovery Twos Program.
In September, we will be running classes for 30 months - School Age out of the Rainbow Room and the Treehouse Room. We are only allowed to take 2 children between the ages of 30 months and 36 months in each classroom due to Licensing Regulations.
We are still included in the Government’s CCFRI rebate program and each child will receive a rebate to lower the monthly childcare fees. The amounts of each rebate is dependant on the days and times of your child’s classes.
CURRENT FAMILIES:
Please check for your child’s Registration Form which will be sent home in the first week back to Preschool in January. Fill it out, listing your #1 and #2 choices. Attach your deposit cheque to the form and drop it off to your teacher BEFORE Feb. 1st to get PRIORITY REGISTRATION. Please make the cheque payable to ST. CATHERINE’S CHILDCARE SOCIETY and please DATE THE CHEQUE FOR MAY 1st, 2024.
If we find that we have more than 24 children enrolling for the same classroom, we may have to do a lottery draw to determine who gets a placement. Anyone not chosen, will go on a waitlist, and will be enrolled in their second choice of classes.
On Feb. 1st, we will fill in all the empty spaces with the Community families so make sure you get your registrations in before that happens or you will lose your Priority Registration and you may not get the class you want.
The Classrooms in December are a little chaotic…but in a GOOD way! There are lots of decorations and lights up and we begin practising for the Christmas Service and we begin the difficult task of trying to get every child to make a gift for their parents when we are bombarded with absences due to sickness and holidays! The teachers are on overtime, trying to get a million things done at once!! Check out what actually happened below!
RAINBOW ROOM - Danielle (Tu/Th), Rebecca (M/W), Vibha (M-Th)
This month, we had the pleasure of exploring a very magical theme with the twos, CHRISTMAS! We had many decorations in the classroom including sparkly ornaments, ribbons, garlands, stockings by the fireplace, upside down reindeers and so much more. These decorations added colour, texture, and festivity to our space.
A few of our art activities for Christmas included: making angels with gold tissue paper, paper plate wreaths, Christmas light fingerprints, Christmas tree cotton bud painting, gluing cotton balls onto Santa's beard, as well as creating unique wrapping paper for parents using stamps.
For Circle Time we had a combination of felt board stories, songs, interactive games, and Christmas stories. We sang many Christmas songs including silent night, twinkle twinkle little star and shake it Santa shake it. We played “Angel Angel what do you see?”. For Rhymes and Felt Board stories we included Five Santa’s felt rhyme, Five little bells felt board story and “Rudolph! Rudolph!”. A few of the Christmas stories we read were: “Here comes Christmas” and “Who will guide my sleigh tonight” CD story.
Rudolph! Rudolph! Felt board story:
Rudolph! Rudolph! What will you do?
You can’t guide Santa if your nose is BLUE!
Rudolph! Rudolph! you’re such a silly fellow
Who will know it’s you if your nose is YELLOW
Rudolph! Rudolph! your way cannot be seen,
Through the wintry weather if your nose is GREEN
Rudolph! Rudolph! Santa gave a wink
But what will he say if your nose is PINK?
Rudolph! Rudolph! it’s time to fly at night
But you can’t get through the snow if your nose is WHITE
In the classroom, we enjoyed playing with different textures of green and red shredded paper, spikey and fluffy Christmas garlands, smooth and rough sparkly ornaments, and matching gifts to corresponding colored paper. The children even came up with their own game by hiding little ornaments under bowls and trying to guess where the ornaments went. In the home corner, we enjoyed scooping cookies with spatulas, putting them into the oven and pouring tea. We loved sweeping up the spilled sand from the sandbox into the dustpan and we loved to watch the water table empty into a bucket. Due to the mostly rainy weather this month, we spent most days going to the gym. In the gym we rode bikes, scooters, and drove toy cars. We even drove through the drive through and ordered as many scoops of ice cream as we wanted! We pulled each other in wagons, balanced and jumped through hula hoops.
We would like to thank the parents for joining us in the classroom while we sang our Christmas songs as well as to thank you for your kind words and generosity this December.
We look forward to seeing you all in January. Happy Holiday’s and warm wishes,
TREEHOUSE ROOM - Carol (Tu/Th), Catriona (MWF), Gabi (M-F), Karen (M-F), Mary (M-F)
Happy New Year Treehouse families!
I hope you all had a relaxing, peaceful Christmas with family and friends! Thank you for your good wishes, your kindness and the wonderful gifts you showered us with!
December was a short, but very busy month in the preschool. The children were excited to create a gift for their parents and loved the steps from making cards, wrapping gifts, to putting everything together for their personal little package. We were so happy to see that giving, rather than receiving presents were equally rewarding for them. Some of you dropped off little bags to share with friends and those were also greatly appreciated. Your well mannered little people thanked their friends, and kept sneaking out to their cubbies to make sure that the goodies were still there!
In the first few days of December we had a Nativity set out for the children to enjoy, and our activities were around that special night too. Then the whole room was transformed into a Winter Wonderland. We had a Coffee Shop, a sleigh pulled by two reindeer, an elf's Toy Shop, a Gingerbread House, and an interactive gingerbread scene. All our art, circle activities, games were Christmas themed for our little friends.
The Christmas Service was great. Thank you for showing your support and thank you for attending! Your children worked very hard to prepare for the event, we are so proud of them!
Both of our classes enjoyed a visit to the Library and it was such great experience for us all to walk together and enjoy some more Christmas stories, learn some new action songs.
Our friends did an amazing job to walk safely, listen to instructions and sit attentively.
SUNFLOWER ROOM (MWF) - Carol, Danielle
Happy New Year to All the Sunflower Room Families.
What an amazing and fun filled December we had. We learned, practiced, played, practiced again, performed, created and celebrated together. We enjoyed the experience of making gifts for our families, and the fun of trying to keep it all a secret. We learned that it is a joy to give gifts, including the gift of time, by performing songs we’d been practicing over the weeks leading up to our Christmas service in the church.
Many of our art projects this past month involved making the gifts that went home with the children. We mixed the Rooibos tea with various spices and dried orange peel; our classroom smelled so lovely and festive and we learned about the different ingredients, many of which we hadn’t seen before (star anise was new to most). The next week we mixed the ingredients for our spiced cranberry sauce (once again slicing and dicing the dried orange zest) and cooked it in Danielle’s Instant Pot in the room next door; another day of beautiful aromas.
We always decorate the containers our gifts go into, so we painted the jars for the Cranberry Sauce, decorated the bags we packaged the tea in, and also painted the boxes to house the rest of our goodies. We had made some cinnamon dough ornaments, but they just didn’t make it up to our usual high standards (they cracked and broke) so the lesson learned that day was “oh well, these things happen” (and for the teachers, “won’t do that again”!) We just made a different Christmas tree ornament with the children to add to their gift boxes. And the broken ornaments? Well they spent the following week on our science table, as part of our smell the spices display: cinnamon ornaments, ground ginger, whole cardamom, whole coriander and ground cloves.
It wouldn’t be a present without a card, so the children’s little finger prints became lightbulbs on a string of Christmas lights. The class really enjoyed these activities. We also created a lot of art to decorate the classroom:
We started with a nativity scene with Mary Joseph and the baby Jesus in a stable. We made gingerbread men, stockings, marble art candy canes, angels, painted pictures from the Nutcracker Ballet , the Sugarplum Fairies and the Dance of Tea, (while listening to the Nutcracker Suite,) Santas from coffee filters and cotton balls, Christmas trees and wreaths. We wrote a letter to Santa, and each child drew a picture of what they hoped for. It was wonderful when we got a letter back, telling us a little about the North Pole and that Santa enjoyed our pictures.
The children are enjoying taking turns to entertain Echo the Orca for a weekend and then telling the class all about it and showing us pictures of all they did. They really get excited about whose turn it is next!
We had a great time (and were lucky with the weather) walking to Edgemont Village and doing some carolling for the people living at the Amica Residence, as well as for the general public at two more spots before returning to preschool. This was an opportunity to sing again, some of the songs we learned for our Christmas service. A special “thank you” to Tony, a member of St. Catherine’s Church who accompanied us on Trombone.
On our last day of preschool in 2023 we celebrated with our Christmas party. Lots of special party food thanks to our parent helpers this time, party games, music and dancing.
The teachers would like to say a very big “Thank you” for your thoughtfulness and generosity. All the lovely cards and presents are very much appreciated.
We have a wonderful class and the teachers hope you all have had a relaxing and fun filled holiday. Danielle and Carol have seriously recharged their energy levels over the break so that we can fill the new term with many new play and learning opportunities.
See you all on Monday 8 January, 2024.
RESOURCE ROOM - Marion
December was filled with so much excitement, from gift making to lots of seasonal crafts. The children worked on their fine motor skills with each activity. The teachers rehearsed with the children at circle time and in the music room. We had two dress rehearsals preparing for the big night. Thank you for coming out and sharing the evening with everyone.
Letters will be sent out in January regarding Kindergarten readiness. Please review them and if you have any questions, please ask the teachers or email the office.
Looking forward to 2024, Marion