279 Egg Harbor Road Sewell, New Jersey 08080
NOVEMBER 2015
Dear Chesterbrook Parents,
It is hard to believe that it is already the month of
November and that the hustle and bustle of the
holidays will be starting in just a few short weeks. This
is the time of the year that flies by because everyone is
so busy…and our school is no exception. We have a
lot planned and another busy month ahead of us.
Here are a few important dates to remember…
•Starting Monday, November 3rd to Friday, November
20th we will be having a Food Drive. We will be
collecting canned goods and nonperishable items that
will be donated to The Church of the Holy Family in
Sewell. They will be delivering the food to local families
in need.
•Saturday, November 7th we are having an Open
House and Family Book Fair Day from 10am-1pm.
Perspective parents are welcome to stop by to tour the
school. Enrolled parents are also welcome to come in
and get an early jump on the Book Fair and meet
Clifford the Big Red Dog.
•Monday, November 9th to Friday November 14st we
will be holding a Scholastic Book Fair . The Scholastic
Book Fair is a literacy event that puts books in the
hands of children and helps raise funds for our school.
All week long there will be books, for every age group,
on sale to purchase.
•Wednesday, November 11th the school will be closed
for Professional Development Day. This day gives our
teachers the opportunity to brush up on their skills and
learn something new in all areas
•of child development.
•Monday, November 16th
LifeTouch will be here for
School Portraits.
•Friday, November 20th at 11:30 am is our annual
Thanksgiving Feast. All families are welcome to
attend and partake in the feast with their child’s
class.
•Chesterbrook Academy will be closed on Thursday,
November 26th for Thanksgiving, but will be open
on Friday, November 27rd. Reminder to all parents
that the flu vaccine is mandatory for children 6
months to 5 years old attending a preschool. Please
provide documentation to us by December 1st.
Thank you to all of our families that attended the
Halloween Parade…all the children loved showing
off their costumes off and making you parents
proud.
Have a great month…and Happy Thanksgiving from
our family to yours!!
Stacy
Raising a Thankful Child:
Great Ways to Teach (and
show) Your Preschooler
Generosity
Infants
Hello, November! We have a very fun filled month ahead of us. We will be working
on various Links to Learning skills from smiling to walking on our own.
Toddler A
It’s Turkey Time! Thank you so much for making our Halloween Celebration a
Success! This month the children will be concentrating on mastering Gross Motor
Skills by doing activities that develop strong muscles. Our Color of The Month will be
Brown, and our Shape of The Month will be a Square. We are enjoying the books
brought in for Share a Book Day! Keep up the good work!
Toddler B
The children did really well identifying the Color Orange. Brown is our new Color of
The Month. Some of our Links To Learning skills will be understanding big/little,
exploring nesting cups and listening to a 5 minute story with pictures. Details for our
Thanksgiving Feast will follow. We hope everyone can attend!
Beginner A
We are welcoming November in Beginner A! It has been a great school year so far
and the children are doing great! We will be working on self-help skills such as
putting our own jackets on as it gets cooler. We will also learn new Spanish
vocabulary this month such as “amarillo” (yellow), “triangulo” (triangle), “hace calor”
(it’s warm), and “hace frio” (it’s cold). Also, most of the children have been practicing
using the potty. It is a skill we will continue to work on as November progresses. As
always it is a pleasure teaching your children.
Beginner B
Welcome to November in Beginner B! This month we will continue to work on selfhelp skills such as independent potty skills and putting on their own jacket. The
children will learn their new Spanish vocabulary. They will learn “amarillo” (yellow),
“triangulo” (triangle), “hace frio” (it’s cold), and “hace calor” (it’s warm). We will
continue to practice letter recognition by doing letter of the week. This month we will
have letter of the week for letters D,E and F! Our Thanksgiving feast information will
be sent home. This month we will celebrate Kyle and Charli’s 3rd Birthday!
Intermediates
The Intermediates class is doing so well the first few months. We are moving along
nicely. The children are working hard on letter and number recognition. They are
counting, recalling shapes and working on adding and subtracting. The children
have been learning a lot about weather and graphing. We work daily on socialemotional skills with the children and they get a lot of exercise doing the parachute,
kicking balls, rolling and jumping to show us their balance and motor skills. We are
looking forward to another great month!
PreK
October flew by for us in Pre- K. We learned lots of new lessons and did a lot of fun
academic and Halloween activities. We welcomed a new friend to our class, AJ
Alexander, in October. We had a great time at Johnson’s Corner Farm on our field
trip picking pumpkins at the pumpkin patch. Thank you to all parents and
chaperones for joining us on the trip. November is going to be full of lots of fun
activities. We will have our Thanksgiving Day Feast and Picture Day. In November
we are going to be working and focusing on number recognition and counting. We
also will be working on responding to “why” and “how” questions appropriately. We
are also going to be doing experiments using our senses. This month we will also
touch on the history of Thanksgiving and Veterans Day.
Kindergarten
Welcome, November! This month we are focusing on blending initial, medial, and
final letter sounds, writing and recognizing high frequency words, counting and
recognizing numbers 1-50, learning how plants and animals grow and change and
much more! Reminder that the school will be closed on Wednesday, November 11th.
Kindergarten conferences will be taking place on Tuesday November 17th and
Wednesday November 18th. There will be a sign up sheet posted on the door for
different conference times. We will also be celebrating Kirstin’s birthday this month!
Calendar of Events
Saturday, November 7th Open House and Family
Book Fair Day
10am-1pm
Week of November 9th Scholastic Book Fair
November 9th - November 20th Food Drive
Wednesday, November 11th School Closed for
Professional Development Day
Monday, November 16th LifeTouch picture
portraits
Friday, November 20th Thanksgiving Feast at
11:30am
Thursday, November 26th School closed for
Thanksgiving
Don’t forget to visit our website
for the lunch menu, special
event dates, reminders and so
much more…
sewell.chesterbrookacademy.com
Your Child’s Health…
A Little Bit of Extra Sleep Pays Off Big for Kids
By Denise Mann
WebMD Health News
Twenty-seven minutes. That's how much extra sleep a schoolaged child needs per night to be brighter and more
productive the following day.
According to a new study, kids who slept that extra amount
each night were less impulsive, less easily distracted, and less
likely to have temper tantrums or cry often and easily. By
contrast, losing just shy of an hour’s worth of sleep had the
opposite effects on behavior and mood.
“Small changes in bedtime and daily routine could go a long
way,” says researcher Reut Gruber, PhD. She is an assistant
professor of psychology at McGill University in Montreal,
Quebec, Canada.
Sleepless in Grade School
Gruber’s study included 34 kids aged 7 to 11 with no sleep,
medical, behavior, or academic problems. The children's
bedtimes were moved up or back an hour relative to their
usual bedtimes for one week. Their daytime behaviors were
rated by their teachers and parents at the end of the week.
Those kids who got 27.36 minutes more sleep per night
showed improvements, while those who got less sleep did
not.
Is this modest amount really enough?
“In daily life, if you think of the impact of short power naps,
usually about 15 to 20 minutes during the day, you can see
that this amount of sleep can have a significant positive
impact on mood, attention, and well-being,” says Gruber.
Most school-aged children go to bed later than 9 p.m., and
43% of boys ages 10 to 11 sleep less than the recommended
amount each night. According to the National Sleep
Foundation, children aged 5 to 12 need 10 to 11 hours of sleep
a night. Yawning and drowsiness are not the only signs that a
student is getting too little sleep. Other symptoms include
hyperactivity, crankiness, impulsiveness, and a short attention
span.
9 Steps for More Sleep
Implementing these nine simple steps can help assure that
your kids get the sleep they need…
1. Lead by example. “Prioritize sleep in your daily choices,”
Gruber says.
2. Set a fixed bedtime and wake time. “The body adapts to
falling asleep at a certain time, but only if the sleep schedule is
relatively consistent, with no more than one hour of bedtime
difference between school nights and weekends or holidays,”
she says.
3. Create a consistent, calm bedtime routine. “The ideal
sleeping environment is quiet, dark, and cool in the
evening, and well lit in the morning,” Gruber says. “It is
important that the sleeping environment should be
associated with positive experiences and emotions and,
therefore, parents should not use the bedroom or going to
bed early as punishments.” Along the same lines, TVs,
computers, and cell phones should not be in the bedroom.
4. Avoid heavy meals during the two hours before
bedtime. “A small snack close to bedtime is acceptable, so
that the child does not go to bed hungry,” she says.
Caffeine should also be avoided in the late afternoon and
evening. This includes chocolate and soda.
5. No more naps. “Napping during the day may create
difficulty in nighttime sleeping,” she says.
6. Exercise regularly, as long as it is done during the day
and not too close to bed.
7. Do homework earlier. Staying up later to finish
homework is a no-no, says Nina Shapiro, MD. She is the
director of pediatric otolaryngology at Mattel Children’s
Hospital UCLA. “If you have second- through sixth-graders
staying up even an hour later each night to finish their
homework, it has consequences.”
The solution? Start homework earlier.“This can be hard if a
child has a full day at school, after-school activities, and
working parents who like to have family dinner on the later
side,” she says. “Kids can get crunched, but something has
got to give.” This can be TV or computer time, an
extracurricular activity, or simply trying to be more efficient
with homework.
8. Start the bedtime routine earlier. Telling young kids
their bedtime got moved up is a hard sell, Shapiro says.
Instead, start the whole process 30 minutes earlier. This
includes brushing teeth and reading a book to or with your
child. “Reading a book is a great way to drift off to sleep.”
Making the after-dinner routine more geared toward sleep
makes sense, says Jeff Sapyta, PhD. He is a child
psychologist at Duke University Medical Center in Durham,
N.C. “It should be about slowing down, not speeding up.”
9. Aim for 10 hours of sleep a night for 6- to 12-year-olds.
There is not necessarily a one-size-fits-all sleep prescription
for kids, but shooting for 10 hours a night is a good goal,
Sapyta says. It will pay dividends. “We see a significant
difference in how a child behaves in school and emotionally
based on restricting or allowing more sleep in just one
week.”
Raising a Thankful Child:
Great Ways to Teach (and show) Your
Preschooler Generosity
By Amanda Rock
Every year around Thanksgiving, my kids come home with
the same type of project. Sometimes it's a placemat, other
times we've gotten a decorated poster complete with glitter
and stickers and one year we even were blessed with a 3D
diorama. The vehicle is always different, but the message is
always the same -- "What I'm Thankful For." When they were
younger, the list was very basic. "My toys." "My mom." "The
cat." Simple items that are the basic cornerstones of every
preschooler's world. But as they got older, my kids started
to get a bit more in-depth with their thoughts. "The world."
"My friends." "That I'm healthy."
What is it that makes a person thankful and why is it that we
often only acknowledge our appreciate for what is
important in our lives around the holidays? While it's true
that we shouldn't only be thankful at the end of the year, it's
actually a very good time to talk to your children about the
concept and why it is so important.
This is especially true with preschool-age children who often
do best learning a new idea when it is modeled for them. So
whether it is November or March, there are easy ways for
your to demonstrate to your little one the notions of
thankfulness, kindness and generosity and why they are so
important.
Set a good example. You are your child's first and best role
model. If she sees you engaging in generous behavior, she'll
want to do the same thing. So if you are buying food for a
local food drive or donating clothing to a church, let your
preschooler know what you are doing and why. You aren't
showing off or patting yourself on the back, you are
demonstrating generosity in action.
Let her help. If her preschool is holding a toy drive, let her
come with you to pick out the toy and wrap it. Explain why
toys are being collected and why it is important that you
help. Don't ask her to donate her own money, but if she
volunteers, accept with great praise. If she has a lot of toys
lying around that she no longer plays with that are in good
shape, consider approaching her about donating them to a
needy family or local preschool or day care center.
Put things in perspective. Naturally self-centered creatures,
it's hard for preschoolers to grasp that there is a big world
and it isn't orbiting around them. Do your best to explain
that just like he does, people everywhere have different
things that they need. Without being too heavy-handed, talk
about how some people need warm food to eat and clothes
to wear and how it is very nice when other people help out
by buying these types of things.
Start off small. By simply teaching your child to share or to
better get along with a sibling, you are one step closer to
raising a child who appreciates what he has. Learning to be
considerate of others is a big lesson for a preschooler to
learn and one that translates well into a bigger arena when
he gets older.
Praise and scold appropriately. When your child does
perform an act of kindness, be effusive in your approval. Say
things like, "I'm so proud of you for sharing the toys at
preschool." More than anything else, your preschooler
wants to make you happy, so when she does, shout it from
the mountaintops. As she gets older, she'll still appreciate
your support, but will behave in a generous fashion because
it makes her feel good. At the same time, if your preschooler
behaves selfishly, be sure to let her know. "It makes me and
your friend sad when you grab toys away. Why don't you
take turns?“
Stress the importance of manners. Thank you is such a
simple phrase, but it makes such a difference in a little one's
behavior and how he is perceived. At first, the words may
just come out of your child's mouth out of force of habit or
because you are prompting -- "What do we say?" -- but
eventually he'll grasp the meaning behind them. Talk about
why telling someone "thank you" is important. Point out a
time that someone said "thank you" to him and how that
made him feel good inside.
Get them to take stock. The projects that my kids do every
year are actually a great idea. It makes them stop and think
about the people and things that matter most to them and
why. In the beginning, you might be concerned if your little
one rattles off a list of all the toys and things that she owns,
but even being thankful for material things is OK. Just be
sure to help her balance the list out by pointing out the
people in her lives that she loves too.
As your little one develops characteristics like empathy and
sympathy, so too will his sense of gratitude -- attributes that
will help make up his value system. Teaching a child to be
thankful, generous and kind is a lifelong process, and one
that involves lots of friends and family to help -- certainly
something to be grateful for.