September 2026: A Growing Community!
SimpleLife is more than a preschool; it is a dedicated community that has grown in strength and warmth over the years.
Thank you for your continued support and for being an essential part of our journey.
Monthly Mindful Focus: Kindness and Friendship
Monthly Explorations: School, Harvest, Fruits and Vegetables
New songs we sang this month:
The Welcome Song
The Wheels on the Bus
Make New Friends
Way Up High in the Apple Tree
The start of a new school year is always a very exciting time! I felt so confident with the support of our seasoned teachers. Having a team that has all worked here for multiple years has been such a blessing. Although it takes time for the children to learn school routines and expectations, we have been able to manage multiple fun learning activities. We have continually been working on how to be a kind, independent, and respectful learner!
Bridging the gap between home and school. How can parents best support their preschoolers’ education? Have non-expectation conversations. Use the daily chalkboard and school photos to ask your child what they did at school each day. Ask them questions about how they felt during different activities.
Can’t wait for the amazing activities to experiences to come!
Much Love!
- Miss Demi
Fruits and Veggies Exploration:
Food is a part of our everyday world. We must teach our children about it.
At SimpleLife Preschool, we encourage and celebrate learning through experiences. This month we have been observing and exploring different types of fruits and vegetables! Our circle time activities included noticing the differences in shape, color, and size of a fruit or vegetable, the opportunity to practice using a kid-friendly knife (with teacher’s help) to slice different vegetables, and taste testing! It was fun to see the children thoughtfully try different varieties of apples and be able to vote on their favorite. I was surprised to discover that some children preferred the tart Granny Smith apples! It can be a time of discovery for the teachers as well, learning about and trying different foods.
The preschool snacks during this time of year include the opportunity for children to try foods, including some grown in the school garden- figs, cucumbers, and tomatoes. It can be an interesting experience for the children to try a new food and have the chance to decide if they enjoy eating it. When trying new foods, we suggest the children practice saying “I’m still learning to like it”. As an adult, I have been learning to like new foods as well! Sometimes, it takes multiple “tries” or “tastes” before our body and brain decide if we enjoy that type of food. There are children who share with us that they now like a certain food they did not a few weeks ago, or sometimes they weren’t sure the previous school year and now they enjoy it.
We encourage you to ask your child questions about the food they may have tried during snack time and continue the exploration of fruits and vegetables at home!
- Miss Missy
Mindful Focus: Kindness and Friendship
“Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.”
- Mother Teresa
What a beautiful month it has been learning about kindness and friendship! All month long, these sweet kids have been working on learning their new classmates’ names and finding ways to befriend one another. Whether it was asking someone to come play with them or helping a friend feel better when they were sad, we saw so many examples of kindness and friendship.
Watching children reach out to one another is so pure and incredibly rewarding as a teacher. We love witnessing the genuine love one child can show another. Though many of them are still so little, they are genuinely good at heart and have such a natural desire to be loved, included, and accepted by others.
It has been such a joy to watch these friendships begin to grow.
- Miss Annie
Harvest Season Exploration:
Dedication from the Spring and surprises from Mother Nature.
This month during Nature Time, we had so much fun exploring the wonders of harvest season! We went on a nature walk and harvested a variety of fruits and vegetables, including root vegetables. We talked about how they differ in color, shape, size, and taste. The children got to sample tomatoes, figs, carrots, and more, and I loved watching their curiosity and excitement as they discovered where their food comes from. Because of this year’s freeze, we couldn’t harvest apples ourselves, which gave the children a wonderful real-life lesson about how weather affects what we grow. We still brought apples into the classroom, where we peeled and sliced them to make dried apples, learned about how a dehydrator works, and used a juicer to make fresh apple juice that we all got to taste. The children were absolutely thrilled!
We also harvested seeds, learning that some are edible while others can be saved to grow new plants. The children took some seeds home to plant flowers of their own from our pollinator garden, and we even harvested milkweed seeds to help support our monarch butterflies. I truly enjoyed sharing these hands-on experiences with the children and watching their excitement as they touched, tasted, explored, and discovered the natural world around them. These moments are some of my favorite parts of teaching because the children get to learn real-life lessons through experiences they can see, feel, and enjoy together.
- Miss Mallorie
Art Exploration:
Self Portraits, Large Easel Paintings, Stickies Project, Harvest Still Life, and Clay Exploration
I absolutely adore our first art projects of the school year! So many of our new friends come in having only done art in one or two ways, and we get to teach them that the only limit to art is the limit of their imagination! Each project we do during the month of September is intentionally thought out to teach them new words, styles, and mediums to create their art with. We’re able to talk about the difference between something representational and something abstract - discussing how both are beautiful and have their place - and learn new terms like ‘still life’ and ‘self-portrait.’
While learning about each of the different styles, the children also get to learn to use tons of mediums that we will continue to learn and grow with throughout the school year. We use easels, tempera paint, watercolor paint, glue sticks, liquid glue, tape, staples, and even clay! Some of these projects have a lot of structure, like using watercolor to create a still life-painting what we can see sitting in front of us - or using mirrors and crayons to draw a picture of ourselves. Others are much more loose and solely about learning about the materials in front of us! The kids love exploring with all different kinds of ways to stick things to paper with our ‘stickies’ project, learning how paint colors mix while we paint outside, and of course learning all about clay and how it behaves similarly - and a lot differently - to the Play-Doh they’re all familiar with, especially as we introduce water!
We had so much fun creating and exploring this month; it’s an absolutely incredible opportunity to see the world through a child’s eyes! I truly cannot wait to see how much they learn and grow in their own art style by May!
- Miss Sushi
