Welcome new teachers!

Happy new year to everyone and I hope that everyone enjoyed and rested in the holiday season. We are so excited for 2016!

I love the following quote. We try to tell our kids this and it is great for us to follow these ideas too:

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're doing something.

By Neil Gaiman

2016 is off to a wonderful start for us, including some exciting changes. As most of you know, we have been interviewing for a while in our quest to find the right people to join our team. We were looking for a full-time person for Purple Room because Teacher Rosemary needed to reduce her hours, and for one teacher each for Rose Room and Green Room as their enrollments have grown.

We deeply appreciate your patience during the hiring process, and especially those of you who helped refer candidates to us. We are very happy to announce that we are now fully staffed (yay!!!!) and ask you to join us in welcoming our new teachers to the team!

Welcome to Teacher Vianna in Purple Room

Teacher Vianna started substituting for us the last week of December and is now officially the co-teacher with Teacher Rashida in Purple Room. Her hours are 9:30-6:00 daily, so those of you with later pick-ups will get to consistently see her in the evenings. Vianna has a degree in ECE and several years of teaching experience. We are excited to welcome her to the preschool team!

But what about Teacher Rosemary?
Teacher Rosemary has begun phasing out of Purple Room as Vianna phases in, but rest assured, she will still be with us every day. Starting February 1, Teacher Rosemary will become our "Art & Science Teacher in Residence," meaning that she will be rotating through each classroom (probably one day/week in each room) to work on special art and science projects with all of the children. This has always been one of her greatest strengths, so now all the rooms will get to benefit from her curriculum talent!

Welcome to Teacher Kayleigh in Rose Room (and helping preschool and Green Room)

Teacher Kayleigh joined us full-time in mid-October. She is the assistant teacher in Rose Room in the mornings, helps Green Room with their lunches, and then supports preschool in the afternoons. Talk about multi-tasking! We appreciate her flexibility and willingness to serve as the "bridge" or familiar face for children who are transitioning between classrooms. Kayleigh is new to this field professionally but grew up with younger siblings and has worked with young children for a long time in other settings. She is Teacher Ramona's daughter and Teacher Julia's big sister. Welcome, Kayleigh!

Welcome to Teacher Katie (Green Room)
Teacher Katie joined Green Room in mid-November. Her hours are 9:00-3:00 Monday through Friday. Katie has a degree in music and is currently a part-time student working toward her Master's in clinical psychology. She has experience working with toddlers in a summer program and is continuing to take classes in child development as well. She has a specific interest in (and talent for!) working with young children. We are so glad she joined our team!

Referrals are still welcome.

We don't have any more full-time or part-time regular staff openings, but we are always open to substitutes, student teachers, or volunteers. If you know anyone who needs or wants experience with young children, we are always happy to share what we do with the next generation of teachers.

I am very excited to welcome Teachers Vianna, Kayleigh, and Katie to our Creative Minds family!

Richa Kapur

Snowman, Spirit Week, Cookie Decorating!

Thank you so much to A's mom who has been coming into Rose Room and helping out with our center time! The kids love it when parents volunteer and it is so helpful for the teachers to get an extra hand. She came in and helped our kids make snowmen! The kids got to glue on cotton balls for the body, googley eyes, a black hat, orange nose, and pipe cleaners for the arms. They turned out so cute!

























Spirit week is always such a fun time for both preschool classrooms as well as the toddler room to dress up and act silly! It was so nice to see all the kids participating in our spirit week. It makes the room more fun and the kids enjoy looking at the silly outfits their friends are wearing!

























To get into the holiday spirit, we had a cookie decorating day when parents got to decorate cookies with their child. What better way to start off Christmas than with cookies for breakfast? Kids loved putting frosting and many different kinds of sprinkles onto their cookies! Each kid got to make a couple cookies and even ate the rest of mommy or daddy's cookie if they couldn't finish it :)



















We hope all of our families had a great holiday and a happy new year!
Love, Rose Room

Snowflakes, Hot Chocolate and Pajama Day, Trees!

Since the weather has been changing and it's been very cold outside lately, we decided to make snowflakes! Thank you, preschool, for helping us prep our snowflakes by gluing together popsicle sticks as our first step! After we let the glue dry overnight, we got our paintbrushes and painted our snowflakes blue! What kind of snowflakes would they be without some sparkle? We also added some glitter, which is one of our favorite things in Rose Room :) The kids did a great job by really taking their time and painting on the popsicle stick!


































Pajama Day is always a very fun day for all of the kids! Getting right out of bed and coming to school in your pajamas is so awesome! The weather couldn't have been better for our hot chocolate and pajamas! It was wet and rainy and we all enjoyed our hot chocolate very much! We even got to do some face painting, which the kids had a lot of fun with! Everyone looked really cute and we sang and danced to "Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer."






















Christmas is right around the corner so we did an art project with trees! The kids got to glue sequins and pom pom balls onto their trees! Glue is a big hit in our classroom. The kids have more fun just putting glue onto their trees than decorating them with anything else :) We have so much fun watching the kids get so creative with their projects and watching them so excited to take their art projects home or looking at them displayed in the classroom!













Thanks for sharing your beautiful children with us each day :)
Love, Rose Room

Thanksgiving Feast!

Rose Room celebrated Thanksgiving this year with our annual thankful feast! This year we celebrated a little bit different, having pizza and veggies instead of turkey. The kids LOVED the pizza so much, they even asked for seconds and thirds :) Thank you to all our wonderful parents for coming and helping out that day we really appreciated it! Some of our moms even brought dessert which was very yummy :)



















Celebrated S's birthday at our thankful feast! Happy Birthday S we love you very much!







Getting ready to celebrate Thanksgiving with our families we read the book "Thankful for Thanksgiving." We even asked the kids what they were thankful for and the answers were adorable:

SR: "C."
AM: "Babies."
AK: "Water."
AR: "Dancing."
MM: "Cars."
IV: "My birthday."
A: "Sandbox."
CK: "Mommy."

If you haven't seen our thankful tree make sure you look at it in our classroom!


We hope all of our families had a very nice Thanksgiving holiday!
Love, Rose Room