I hope everyone had a great Christmas and happy New Year! The year is flying by once again and here we are already fast approaching spring break!

January at preschool brought fun learning all about wintery things like snowmen, the Arctic and Antarctica, hibernation and migration, as well as Martin Luther King, and our five senses. We also incorporated our Children Around the World into the month. The kiddos were happy to be back in preschool, and now we are enrolling new students for the fall. If you know of anyone looking for a preschool, send them our way!

As of writing this, we are in February talking about Community Helpers, outer space, Valentine’s Day, colors and shapes, President’s Day, and opposites. During the second half of the month, we will read and talk about Eric Carle’s terrific books and create art inspired by his style, followed by Dr. Seuss week as we enter the first week of March. These are always such fun weeks talking about Authors and their specific style of book illustrations. The finale of February will be a classroom visit from the Northern Colorado Herpetological Society. We have never had them here before, so we are super excited to meet the live critters they are bringing for us to learn about!

We continue to be blessed with Colorado Shines funding for improvements in the classroom, so the latest big upgrade will be replacing the chairs that were most likely purchased when the program began back in the 90s. They have gotten brittle, and some have broken, leaving sharp edges, so we thought this was the perfect time to update. We continue to find useful ways to improve the classroom with those funds and visitors always give compliments when they see it. The bonus for me is when they need to leave, and they cannot pry their child out to go home! That is one way for a parent to know their child is comfortable here.

This is always a “quiet season” before the crazy busy “storm” that the spring months bring to preschool, so there isn’t a whole lot to report on right now. We will be making up for lost time from these last couple of years when we could not take field trips and such. We have several outings and classroom visitors scheduled to keep us hopping in April and May. I will give you the stories about those as they happen. We are really excited about the adventures we will be having soon as we creep into the spring!

I hope you all have a wonderful month, and we can all look forward to the spring fast approaching, even if the weather doesn’t say so!

Kandy Wise is the Director of Open Arms Preschool, a ministry of Saint John’s Lutheran Church. You may reach her at 482-1357 or OpenArms@StJohnsFC.org with any questions about the Preschool.