From the Principal’s Office
Things are moving right along at Chesterbrook Academy :)! The children and teachers have made the adjustments to new classrooms, new friends, new teachers and new routines. We are back to sending Links to Learning folders home monthly and will be sharing the first Parent Reports of the school year soon. Even though everyone enjoys the low key days of summer, we are always ready to get back to the familiar routines of the school year.
The Charleston Wrap fundraiser has wrapped up and the orders have been submitted. The orders will deliver in plenty of time for the holidays and gift giving. Our next opportunity to participate in a fundraiser will be for Little Caesar’s. Information about placing Little Caesar’s orders will be available soon.
Many of our communications occur through Links 2 Home. Please be sure to let us know if you have any changes in your email address or would like to add an additional email address. Parents are able to make changes to contacts, personal contact information, make one time payments and set up recurring payments through ALMA. If you have not set up your account yet in ALMA, stop by the office and we can walk you through the process.
Enjoy the warm weather while you can, it will be cold before we know it!
Until next month, Vikki & Shawna
Dates
October
September 28 – Links to Learning folders distributed
October 5 – Links to Learning folders returned
October 21 – Principals’ Conference all week
October 22 – Pre-k fieldtrip to Rader Farm
October 30 – Links to Learning folders distributed
October 31 – Scholastic Book orders due
October 31 – Picture Day
October 31 – Halloween Parade @ 2:30 & Parties @ 3:00
November 1 – Picture Day
November 2 – Parent Reports distributed
November 5 – Food drive begins
Open House
November 10th ~ 10:00-1:00
For Parents and Teachers
We will have our fall picture days on October 31 and November 1. We really aren’t sure what to expect with having the first of our picture days the same day as Halloween. We are thinking we will do the younger classrooms on the 31st but will wait to see how things go. Flyers will go home prior to picture day for parents to make their selection from the background choices. There will be a holiday themed background as one of the options. Be sure to watch your child’s cubby for the flyer and please be sure to return it by picture day.
The first Parent Report will be distributed on November 2nd. The Parent Report will let you know where your child is at this point of the school year. Since some of the children have not been in their classroom for very long, many of the skills will be marked as “Introduced” or “Beginning”. This is very appropriate for the first one as the parent reports show growth over the year.
For Parents
Please check your child’s cubby and make sure there is a complete change of clothing appropriate for the season. Be sure to include an extra pair of socks; the socks can get wet during toileting accidents. We try to have a few extra clothes available in case someone needs them but we don’t always get them back for when we need them again.
The Pre-k field trip to Rader Farm has been postponed to October 22nd because of weather. Please be sure you dress your child for the weather as it will more than likely be cooler on the new scheduled day.
Our Halloween parade and snack will be held on October 31st. The parade will be at 2:30 and the children will eat snack at 3:00. Signup sheets will be in the classrooms for parents to volunteer to bring in treats for snack. If you would like to volunteer to help your child’s teacher with the party, please be sure to talk to the teacher. The teachers will help the children change into their costumes as they wake up from nap.
We know how hectic it can be on Halloween to get the kids picked up and dinner eaten before heading out to Trick-or-Treat. To help make the evening a little easier for our parents, we are offering to pick up dinner for you and have it ready to go during pick up time. We have order forms at the front desk for you to preorder gondolas from Avanti’s. We are offering regular gondolas for $7.50 and veggie gondolas for $8.50. Please have your order turned in by 9:00 a.m. on Halloween Day and we’ll have the food here by 3:00 p.m. If you pay by check, please make the check out to Chesterbrook Academy. If you have any questions, please see Vikki or Shawna.
Reminders
Families can earn a free week’s tuition by referring another family for enrollment in the school. The tuition credit is applied after the referred family has been enrolled for three months.
Please be sure you are either reminding your child or helping your child to wash hands upon arrival at the school. Handwashing is the number one tool against the spread of colds and flu. We appreciate your help in keeping all the children and teachers healthy!
Please be sure you continue to dress your child for outside play. The classrooms go outside daily, weather permitting. As the temperatures get colder, it is always good to have hats and gloves available for the children to put on when going out. The hats and gloves can stay in your child’s cubby so they are ready to go when needed.
Information for Consumer Product Safety Recalls:
Website – http://www.cpsc.gov/en/recalls or Mobile app – RECALLS.GOV
Coming Up…
The school will collect non-perishable food items as a community outreach project. We will collect food items beginning the fifth of November and continue through the day before Thanksgiving. The pre-k class delivers the food to a local food pantry on the day before Thanksgiving, November 21st. Doing a food drive is an easy project for us as the children understand the need for food and are learning the importance of sharing. The teachers talk about the food drive and helping others with the children, and the pre-k children count the items brought in and help monitor our progress.
Chesterbrook Academy will be closed on Monday, November 12th for a Professional Development Day. The teachers will travel to Champaign to join our sister schools for all day training on a variety of topics. We appreciate your support and understanding by making other arrangements for care this day so our teachers can stay current in new trends in early education.
Our annual Thanksgiving Feast will be held on Friday, November 16th. Parents and other special guests are invited to join their child for lunch of turkey and trimmings. We will get more information to you about times and signing up so we have a head count. Watch for more information on Links 2 Home and your child’s cubby.
The center will be closed on Thursday, November 22nd for Thanksgiving Day and also Friday, November 23rd for the day after.
Open House
November 10 ~ 10:00 – 1:00
School Highlights
INFANT 1: Throughout the month of October, we will be using our 5 senses to explore fall activities and weather! We will be using pumpkins, apples and leaves to create beautiful, abstract art projects, develop science experiments and even measure. As we read Pumpkin, Pumpkin by Jeanne Titherington, we will explore a sensory box through sight, smell, touch, taste and sound. We will practice sitting with and without support, while we dig through a container of pumpkin jello, searching for hidden pumpkin candies at the bottom of the container. Feeling cold, squishy jello is so much fun!
INFANT 2: This month, the Infant 2 room is learning all about pumpkins, fire safety, community helpers, outer space and Halloween. We are especially excited to get to explore some pumpkins. We are also excited to start messy Fridays. Please send your child on Fridays in clothes you don’t mind getting a little messy. As the weather gets cooler, please check that your child has weather appropriate extra clothes in his/her cubby just in case. Finally, we want to remind everyone that the children must wear coats to go outside if the temp is under 70⁰. We love getting to play outside, so please make sure your child brings a coat when necessary. You are welcome to leave one here if you prefer.
TODDLERS 1: The month of October looks like fun for the Toddler 1 classroom. At the beginning of the month, we focus on learning about the farm. We will read the stories Down on the Farm and Harvest Party. We will even “milk a cow”; just for pretend, of course! We will use a rubber glove as our cow udder. After filling the glove with white paint, we will poke small holes in the fingertips and use it to paint! Later on in the month it’s all about Halloween! We can’t wait to dive into Halloween books. We will also enjoy creating playdough pumpkins, and even “washing ghosts”! We will use balloons as our ghosts and wash them in our sensory tub of soapy water to go along with our story Five Little Shosts. What fun!
BEGINNER 1: This month the Beginner 1 class had a lot of fun finding Corduroy’s lost button during our Corduroy unit as well as creating our own tire track prints using various road building trucks and exploring trucks in the dirt and making our own Corduroy bears. We also explored apples and were able to taste test yellow, red and green apples and made a class graph about which apple we liked best. Children explored the seeds inside the apples and painted with the apples. We ended the month with our road building/construction unit. The children learned about the many different trucks and tools it takes to build roads and houses. We used our writing skills to decorate tool boxes and hard hats that the men and women in our book wore to keep them safe.
BEGINNER 2: This month we will be exploring lots of fall items. We will discuss differences in shapes and sizes of leaves and gourds. We are really excited to explore and describe pumpkin guts! The last week of the month is reserved for Halloween fun.
INTERMEDIATE 1: September has been a great month in the Intermediate 1 classroom! We are really getting into the flow of our routine and are forming terrific friendships within the classroom. This month, we read City Shapes and practiced identifying our personal features in simple shaped aluminum foil skyscrapers. We also learned all about the animals that live on a farm and practiced identifying the different farm animal family members in English and Spanish. We loved getting to make applesauce in the crockpot while learning about the apple harvest; it made the classroom smell great! Lastly, we read We Are All Alike; We Are All Different and celebrated how we are similar to and different from our friends regarding our physical features, homes, families and personal preferences. We are so excited for October; it is going to be a great month for learning in the Intermediate 1 Room!
PRE-K 1: September went by so fast! October is going to be full of fun activities and festival creations. In the first week of October, we are reading Pumpkins Pumpkins. Some of the activities that we will be doing include exploring what the inside of a pumpkin looks and feels like and using dramatic play to pretend we are in a pumpkin patch. The second week of October, we will be reading No Dragons for Tea. Some of the activities will include creating a fire safety handbook with our names, addresses and phone numbers and learning about calling 911 and how to stop, drop and roll. The third week of October we will be reading Down on the Farm. Some of the activities will be exploring corn in the sensory table with tractors, and learning about how vegetables grow. The fourth week of October we will be reading the Ghost of Halloween. Some of the activities we will do include creating our own ghost using cotton balls and counting different Halloween items. The fifth week of October we will be reading Room on a Broom. Some of the activities will include creating a witch’s brew and creating patterns for a witch’s stockings. This October will be filled with lots of learning and fun hands on activities!
PRE-K 2: Another month gone in Pre-k 2 and we’ve been learning lots! The children are writing their names every day and we are seeing them transition from all uppercase letters to proper case! We are also working on number recognition and writing our numbers (1 – 20). One of the biggest highlights from September was getting two class pets, a male fish named Marshmallow and a female hamster named Brownie. The children are excited for October when they will get to start holding Brownie. Coming up in October, we will be working on writing more letters and numbers. We will also start doing more patterns and puzzles. Our next field trip is also in the first week of October, on October 5th to Rader Family Farms. If you would like to be a parent chaperone, please talk to Ms. Shawna or Ms. Carly about joining us on our field trip!
From the Education Department
From stuffed animals to family pets, children have an innate love for animals. In our classrooms, animal-themed activities are always exciting and engaging for the children. For instance, teachers may transform the dramatic play center into a veterinary office and provide children with stuffed animals, toy doctor props, a pencil,[.....]
Read More »
October Newsletter
From the Principal’s Office
Things are moving right along at Chesterbrook Academy :)! The children and teachers have made the adjustments to new classrooms, new friends, new teachers and new routines. We are back to sending Links to Learning folders home monthly and will be sharing the first Parent Reports of the school year soon. Even though everyone enjoys the low key days of summer, we are always ready to get back to the familiar routines of the school year.
The Charleston Wrap fundraiser has wrapped up and the orders have been submitted. The orders will deliver in plenty of time for the holidays and gift giving. Our next opportunity to participate in a fundraiser will be for Little Caesar’s. Information about placing Little Caesar’s orders will be available soon.
Many of our communications occur through Links 2 Home. Please be sure to let us know if you have any changes in your email address or would like to add an additional email address. Parents are able to make changes to contacts, personal contact information, make one time payments and set up recurring payments through ALMA. If you have not set up your account yet in ALMA, stop by the office and we can walk you through the process.
Enjoy the warm weather while you can, it will be cold before we know it!
Until next month, Vikki & Shawna
Dates
October
September 28 – Links to Learning folders distributed
October 5 – Links to Learning folders returned
October 21 – Principals’ Conference all week
October 22 – Pre-k fieldtrip to Rader Farm
October 30 – Links to Learning folders distributed
October 31 – Scholastic Book orders due
October 31 – Picture Day
October 31 – Halloween Parade @ 2:30 & Parties @ 3:00
November 1 – Picture Day
November 2 – Parent Reports distributed
November 5 – Food drive begins
Open House
November 10th ~ 10:00-1:00
For Parents and Teachers
We will have our fall picture days on October 31 and November 1. We really aren’t sure what to expect with having the first of our picture days the same day as Halloween. We are thinking we will do the younger classrooms on the 31st but will wait to see how things go. Flyers will go home prior to picture day for parents to make their selection from the background choices. There will be a holiday themed background as one of the options. Be sure to watch your child’s cubby for the flyer and please be sure to return it by picture day.
The first Parent Report will be distributed on November 2nd. The Parent Report will let you know where your child is at this point of the school year. Since some of the children have not been in their classroom for very long, many of the skills will be marked as “Introduced” or “Beginning”. This is very appropriate for the first one as the parent reports show growth over the year.
For Parents
Please check your child’s cubby and make sure there is a complete change of clothing appropriate for the season. Be sure to include an extra pair of socks; the socks can get wet during toileting accidents. We try to have a few extra clothes available in case someone needs them but we don’t always get them back for when we need them again.
The Pre-k field trip to Rader Farm has been postponed to October 22nd because of weather. Please be sure you dress your child for the weather as it will more than likely be cooler on the new scheduled day.
Our Halloween parade and snack will be held on October 31st. The parade will be at 2:30 and the children will eat snack at 3:00. Signup sheets will be in the classrooms for parents to volunteer to bring in treats for snack. If you would like to volunteer to help your child’s teacher with the party, please be sure to talk to the teacher. The teachers will help the children change into their costumes as they wake up from nap.
We know how hectic it can be on Halloween to get the kids picked up and dinner eaten before heading out to Trick-or-Treat. To help make the evening a little easier for our parents, we are offering to pick up dinner for you and have it ready to go during pick up time. We have order forms at the front desk for you to preorder gondolas from Avanti’s. We are offering regular gondolas for $7.50 and veggie gondolas for $8.50. Please have your order turned in by 9:00 a.m. on Halloween Day and we’ll have the food here by 3:00 p.m. If you pay by check, please make the check out to Chesterbrook Academy. If you have any questions, please see Vikki or Shawna.
Reminders
Families can earn a free week’s tuition by referring another family for enrollment in the school. The tuition credit is applied after the referred family has been enrolled for three months.
Please be sure you are either reminding your child or helping your child to wash hands upon arrival at the school. Handwashing is the number one tool against the spread of colds and flu. We appreciate your help in keeping all the children and teachers healthy!
Please be sure you continue to dress your child for outside play. The classrooms go outside daily, weather permitting. As the temperatures get colder, it is always good to have hats and gloves available for the children to put on when going out. The hats and gloves can stay in your child’s cubby so they are ready to go when needed.
Information for Consumer Product Safety Recalls:
Website – http://www.cpsc.gov/en/recalls or Mobile app – RECALLS.GOV
Coming Up…
The school will collect non-perishable food items as a community outreach project. We will collect food items beginning the fifth of November and continue through the day before Thanksgiving. The pre-k class delivers the food to a local food pantry on the day before Thanksgiving, November 21st. Doing a food drive is an easy project for us as the children understand the need for food and are learning the importance of sharing. The teachers talk about the food drive and helping others with the children, and the pre-k children count the items brought in and help monitor our progress.
Chesterbrook Academy will be closed on Monday, November 12th for a Professional Development Day. The teachers will travel to Champaign to join our sister schools for all day training on a variety of topics. We appreciate your support and understanding by making other arrangements for care this day so our teachers can stay current in new trends in early education.
Our annual Thanksgiving Feast will be held on Friday, November 16th. Parents and other special guests are invited to join their child for lunch of turkey and trimmings. We will get more information to you about times and signing up so we have a head count. Watch for more information on Links 2 Home and your child’s cubby.
The center will be closed on Thursday, November 22nd for Thanksgiving Day and also Friday, November 23rd for the day after.
Open House
November 10 ~ 10:00 – 1:00
School Highlights
INFANT 1: Throughout the month of October, we will be using our 5 senses to explore fall activities and weather! We will be using pumpkins, apples and leaves to create beautiful, abstract art projects, develop science experiments and even measure. As we read Pumpkin, Pumpkin by Jeanne Titherington, we will explore a sensory box through sight, smell, touch, taste and sound. We will practice sitting with and without support, while we dig through a container of pumpkin jello, searching for hidden pumpkin candies at the bottom of the container. Feeling cold, squishy jello is so much fun!
INFANT 2: This month, the Infant 2 room is learning all about pumpkins, fire safety, community helpers, outer space and Halloween. We are especially excited to get to explore some pumpkins. We are also excited to start messy Fridays. Please send your child on Fridays in clothes you don’t mind getting a little messy. As the weather gets cooler, please check that your child has weather appropriate extra clothes in his/her cubby just in case. Finally, we want to remind everyone that the children must wear coats to go outside if the temp is under 70⁰. We love getting to play outside, so please make sure your child brings a coat when necessary. You are welcome to leave one here if you prefer.
TODDLERS 1: The month of October looks like fun for the Toddler 1 classroom. At the beginning of the month, we focus on learning about the farm. We will read the stories Down on the Farm and Harvest Party. We will even “milk a cow”; just for pretend, of course! We will use a rubber glove as our cow udder. After filling the glove with white paint, we will poke small holes in the fingertips and use it to paint! Later on in the month it’s all about Halloween! We can’t wait to dive into Halloween books. We will also enjoy creating playdough pumpkins, and even “washing ghosts”! We will use balloons as our ghosts and wash them in our sensory tub of soapy water to go along with our story Five Little Shosts. What fun!
BEGINNER 1: This month the Beginner 1 class had a lot of fun finding Corduroy’s lost button during our Corduroy unit as well as creating our own tire track prints using various road building trucks and exploring trucks in the dirt and making our own Corduroy bears. We also explored apples and were able to taste test yellow, red and green apples and made a class graph about which apple we liked best. Children explored the seeds inside the apples and painted with the apples. We ended the month with our road building/construction unit. The children learned about the many different trucks and tools it takes to build roads and houses. We used our writing skills to decorate tool boxes and hard hats that the men and women in our book wore to keep them safe.
BEGINNER 2: This month we will be exploring lots of fall items. We will discuss differences in shapes and sizes of leaves and gourds. We are really excited to explore and describe pumpkin guts! The last week of the month is reserved for Halloween fun.
INTERMEDIATE 1: September has been a great month in the Intermediate 1 classroom! We are really getting into the flow of our routine and are forming terrific friendships within the classroom. This month, we read City Shapes and practiced identifying our personal features in simple shaped aluminum foil skyscrapers. We also learned all about the animals that live on a farm and practiced identifying the different farm animal family members in English and Spanish. We loved getting to make applesauce in the crockpot while learning about the apple harvest; it made the classroom smell great! Lastly, we read We Are All Alike; We Are All Different and celebrated how we are similar to and different from our friends regarding our physical features, homes, families and personal preferences. We are so excited for October; it is going to be a great month for learning in the Intermediate 1 Room!
PRE-K 1: September went by so fast! October is going to be full of fun activities and festival creations. In the first week of October, we are reading Pumpkins Pumpkins. Some of the activities that we will be doing include exploring what the inside of a pumpkin looks and feels like and using dramatic play to pretend we are in a pumpkin patch. The second week of October, we will be reading No Dragons for Tea. Some of the activities will include creating a fire safety handbook with our names, addresses and phone numbers and learning about calling 911 and how to stop, drop and roll. The third week of October we will be reading Down on the Farm. Some of the activities will be exploring corn in the sensory table with tractors, and learning about how vegetables grow. The fourth week of October we will be reading the Ghost of Halloween. Some of the activities we will do include creating our own ghost using cotton balls and counting different Halloween items. The fifth week of October we will be reading Room on a Broom. Some of the activities will include creating a witch’s brew and creating patterns for a witch’s stockings. This October will be filled with lots of learning and fun hands on activities!
PRE-K 2: Another month gone in Pre-k 2 and we’ve been learning lots! The children are writing their names every day and we are seeing them transition from all uppercase letters to proper case! We are also working on number recognition and writing our numbers (1 – 20). One of the biggest highlights from September was getting two class pets, a male fish named Marshmallow and a female hamster named Brownie. The children are excited for October when they will get to start holding Brownie. Coming up in October, we will be working on writing more letters and numbers. We will also start doing more patterns and puzzles. Our next field trip is also in the first week of October, on October 5th to Rader Family Farms. If you would like to be a parent chaperone, please talk to Ms. Shawna or Ms. Carly about joining us on our field trip!
From the Education Department
Learning is Fun with Real and Toy Animals
Read More »