December 2015

From the President

Here are a few quick tidbits to start off your December 🙂

Queen’s Park Preschool Turns 50

The planning is well on the way and we need your help! As part of the carnival, we’d like to have a music stage showcasing some of the preschool’s talent. Dance, music, singing… you name it, we want to hear about it. If you know someone – kids or adults – who might like to join our music stage, please let us know.

We’re also searching for preschool memorabilia… class photos, artwork, report cards (yes, there used to be report cards!)… all those things parents save, we would love to see. As part of the celebration, we’re planning a visual timeline showcasing the preschool over the decades. We would love to see memorabilia from any decade, but we have a special interest in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

New Westminster Family Place

Once again this year, Queen’s Park Preschool will be collecting books and other items for New Westminster Family Place. New Westminster Family Place is a non-profit family resource program for families with children from newborns to five years of age. For the last several years our preschool has offered some community support, and this year we hope to do the same. Items we are collecting are:

• New Children’s books (for children ages new born to 5 years of age) that will be given out to the children at the Family Place Christmas Party
• Items for the Family Place Food Cupboard – toilet paper, kleenex, tuna, pasta, pasta sauce and rice

If you are able to donate an item, please bring it to the preschool by Monday, December 7. We will have a special bin located outside the office door for the Food Cupboard items and a box inside the office for the books. Thank you for supporting New Westminster Family Place.

Lawn Signs

Just a reminder – at the December General Meeting we will be asking for volunteers to take a lawn sign home. If you live on a busier road – either for cars or pedestrians – please consider having a lawn sign in your front yard. Word of mouth is our greatest marketing tool and registration for next year starts in January!

Snow

It’s getting cold outside!  Here is a reminder of what will happen if Mother Nature provides us with a blanket of snow…

The preschool will close if it is too dangerous for teachers, students and parents to get to the preschool. In the event of snow, one of the teachers will endeavour to get to the preschool to assess the conditions. If she feels it is unsafe for the preschool to operate, she will contact the President (Shelley) and/or the VP (Jeff). The decision to close the preschool will be decided between 8:00 – 8:30 AM. Closures will be communicated through the emergency phone trees and email. We will also contact CKNW radio station.

Best Event of the Year

It is that time of year again! The Queen’s Park Preschool Annual Silent Auction will be Saturday, March 5. We are very excited that this year’s auction will be held at the Glenbrook Park Amenities Centre, a gorgeous hall right in our own neighbourhood, just a 2 minute drive from the preschool. The Silent Auction Team is busy working to make it a very memorable and fun night full of food, music, drinks and great company.

Keep an eye on your child’s box, during the first week of January you will be receiving a family donation form. Please fill out this form carefully so that the Special Event Team can correctly price and sort your item. What can you donate you might be asking… gift certificates, gift baskets, hand crafted items, services, or any type of new item. If you are unsure, please ask anyone of the Special Event Team.

Traditionally the evening ends with a very lively Live Auction where some of the larger donations are auctioned off. If you have an item, or service that you think would work well for this, please contact Nigel at fundraising@qpps.ca.

Tickets for the Silent Auction will be distributed first week of February, every family will be given 2 tickets. If by some chance you are unable to use your tickets, please return them to Nigel (Tobin, 3pm class). If you have friends or family who would like to attend the event, additional tickets will be available for purchase on a first come first serve basis.

We are looking forward to a great Silent Auction!

Let’s Get Educated

Here is what you can look forward to on December 3…

For December’s speaker we are lucky for have Jessica Pirnak, our nutrition columnist from the newsletter. Jess is a Registered Dietitian working in Vancouver. She is passionate about education, prevention and creating a healthy community. In her spare time she updates her personal food blog (www.foodyourself.com) where she discusses hot topics in nutrition. She loves working with kids and parents helping them create a positive relationship with food and enjoys discussing sustainable farming practices to anyone who will listen! Jess is currently working at Choices Market and in private practice in North Vancouver and West Vancouver. If she is not talking about food you will find her outdoors either hiking or rock-climbing with her fiance and dog Abby. We are thrilled to have her present on healthy snacking through the holidays! For a little sample of what Jess will be like, check out her column below!

Upcoming January 5 

January’s speaker is Yvonne Andrews from Safe Online Outreach (SOLO), www.safeonlineoutreach.com, and her talk is entitled, Media Literacy for Young Families. She will be speaking about how to limit and monitor screen time, manage electronics with children and youth as they grow and how to build media saavy kids. Their presentations are full of helpful, practical solutions, suggestions and aids all delivered with a healthy dose of humour. Additional tickets will be available for purchase for this presentation.

For any of those parents who have missed a meeting and looking for homework suggestions, I would recommend our last month’s speaker’s e-books on potty training and on sleep which are available for free on her website, www.cheekychops.ca/products. However, if this suggestion isn’t of interest to you, do not hesitate to contact me (martilongstaff@gmail.com) for more possibilities.

Fundraising Reminder

Don’t forget when you are ordering those pizzas – Boston pizza will give 5% of receipts to the preschool. Just write Queens Park Preschool on your receipt and put it in the box at the front of the restaurant. So easy!

Save the date for your meat pie orders – they are coming up in February, April and June!

Registration Next Year

Bring your cheques to the January 5 GM meeting – that is the day registration opens for current families registered at QPPS.

 

 

Nutrition Column – Benefits of Bulk Cooking

Time-challenged, harried, working parents is a theme I hear often from families looking for ways to skip the drive through. Especially when two or three kids are doing multiple after school activities and both parents are on opposite sides of the city – I really don’t know how they keep their energy up! A recommendation I like to make in these situations is bulk cooking. This does require some meal planning but your wallet and heart will thank you later. Pick one night a week to make a couple of meals that you can freeze for later, for instance: chili, home-made mac & cheese, lasagne or other stews/soups. If this is a challenge then next time you make a meal that will freeze and store well make 4x your usual amount. Eventually you’ll have enough different meals in your freezer to serve after these very long days.

What To Do This Christmas?

If you are wondering what to do with the family this holiday season – look no further! One of our parents at the preschool, Tasha Gandevia, has written a blog post chock-full of what you need to know. Now all you have to do is get out there and make those memories 🙂

https://crushedcheerios.wordpress.com/2015/11/07/christmas-2015-events/

3-Year Old Classroom Information

November came through like a cool breeze, awakening our senses to the changing season.  We continued to explore the world around us, make some new friends and interesting discoveries.

Hooray for Diwali!  Donna and I thought we would give this delightful celebration a whirl for the first time at preschool, and it was as beautiful as it was fun!  A festival of happiness and light celebrated predominantly in India, we brought in some terracotta oil lamps (diya) to paint and ate doodh peda (we made this creamy sweet together) and samosas by candle light.  At circle time, we gave a favourite Bev Bos story an Indian twist about a family who has trouble blowing out the diya flame before bedtime.  Thank you to our families for helping us discover this ancient celebration!

Pizza Day was a lot of fun as well.  We read William Steig’s book “Pete’s A Pizza”, a story in which a boy’s father pretends his son is a pizza in an effort to cheer him up.  Acting out the story afterwards, the children seemed to enjoy being sprayed with air (oil), sprinkled with milk carton lids (pepperoni) and paper confetti (cheese) and put into the oven (the teacher chair) for baking!  Also, Charlotte Diamond sang us a favourite pizza song and we talked and joked about all the different things we would eat on a pizza.  Here is a list of what the children thought they might like to try as a topping:

• cheese
• pancakes
• round circles
• pineapple
• dinosaurs
• apple
• no ice cream
• sad pizza
• pepperoni
• food
• olives
• fish
• BBQ sauce
• burger sauce
• macaroni
• smoked salmon and capers (duty parent)
• ham
• peppers
• mushrooms
• caramelized onion (Teacher Donna)

We finally harvested some seeds from our tall, resilient play yard sunflower. The seeds were somewhat soft and not as viable as we had hoped, but it was interesting to bring it to a level where the children could take a closer look and remove some of the hundreds of seeds themselves.  Hopefully the squirrels will enjoy the fruits of our labor!

This coming month, we will be adding a little Christmas to our preschool experience. We will give the children a chance to delve into some of the sights, sounds, and scents they will be seeing around town as we near the Winter Break. There will be plenty of baking in the play house, sleigh rides in the block corner, and decorations of all sorts!

Come celebrate the season with us!

Everyone is welcome to come for an hour long Christmas Party on December 17! There will be activities set up for you to do with your child(ren) and we’ll sing some carols together. Please bring a snack to share. We will pass around a sign up sheet for food items at the General Meeting.

10:15 – 11:15 for the 3am class
1:15 – 2:15 for the 3pm class

The preschool will be closed for Winter Break the following two weeks. Classes will resume on January 5!

Quote of the Month:

At circle time, Jenny wanted to use a candle to tell a story of Diwali.  To start, she went over some basic fire safety information with the children.  Showing them the lighter, she asked them first, what it was?

Children: “A birthday!” “To blow the candles!” 

Teacher Jenny: “And who uses this tool to light candles?” 

Child: “My dad!”

Teacher Jenny: “And is your dad a child or an adult?”

Child: “Uh,..he’s…..my dad!”

Your teachers,

Jenny and Donna

4-Year Old Classroom Information

Our “Preschool in the Park” days have inspired the children to continue building animal houses in the preschool. We set up an “indoor” forest and added pine cones, bark, sticks and stumps for the children to create incredible, detailed homes. The children also collected pine cones, chestnuts, and small sticks, to create a large collage together. They have worked on it for several weeks adding lots of glue and beautiful gold and copper paint. Two stumps were also used to hammer nails into…..the children had to really learn how to be patient as they waited for a turn with the goggles and the hammer!

After building so many animal homes, the children created their own forts using the monkey bars and many, many, many sheets. Flash-lights were added, and most often the children in the forts were either having a tea party or acting as “secret agents”, wearing play glasses and writing clues down on note pads. It was wonderful to see the planning and organizing the children did as they worked together.

Several bear stories were shared this month with the children including two favourites – “Goldilocks and the 3 Bears” and “Corduroy” (by Don Freeman). The children loved hearing the 3 Bears story told and sung in different ways (including listening to it on a record player), and loved acting the story out with props including real oatmeal and of course three teddy bears. A favourite song that the children enjoyed acting out was “Grizzly Bear”. The children would take turns pretending to be a bear while hiding under a blanket (the cave). Here are the words:

Grizzly Bear oh Grizzly bear,

is sleeping in his cave (sing twice)

Please be very quiet

very very quiet,

do not wake him

do not shake him,

he will be so mad!!

Growl!!!

We finished off the month with creating beds for our own stuffed animals and inviting our stuffed animals to the preschool. What fun! Thank you to our parents that came out to help with sewing buttons on special stuffy blankets.

As it is getting closer to that festive time of year we are looking forward to doing a few merry activities such as:

• “Cookie baking” with play dough pretend baking in the house area
• A scavenger hunt
• Creating bird feeders to give to the birds at “Preschool in the Park”
• a “writing” centre (for card making)
• Jingle bell songs and reindeer games
• Applesauce and cinnamon ornaments
• Using LOTS of glitter!

On December 18 we will have our Christmas Party instead of a regular class.

The party times will be:

10am –11am – for the 4am class
1pm – 2pm – for the 4pm class

Parents/grandparents are asked to stay throughout the party (as there will be no official duty parents that day) and have fun with the children making some Christmas crafts, enjoying some goodies and then singing some carols at the end. Siblings are more than welcome! A sign up sheet for goodies will be put on the sign in desk the week before the party.

We hope you all have a wonderful holiday time with your families…..Merry Christmas!

Your Teachers,
Barb and Eleanor

Recycled/Natural Items Needed:

• We will need Evergreen boughs for a special activity we are doing at the Christmas Party. If you have any to spare, could you please bring them in on Wednesday Dec. 16.
• We are still collecting small glass jars (no lids needed) approx. 300ml sized

Things to Remember:

• “Preschool in the Park” is on Dec. 4
• Dress appropriately for the weather, as we go outside each day….Rainpants are a good idea as often the children are playing with water outside. Please send along mitts and hats too.
• Preschool is closed from Dec. 19, 2014 – Jan. 3, 2016 and will re-open on Monday Jan. 4, 2016.