Our Children's Center (OCC) • 90 North Main Street, West Hartford, CT 06107 • 860.561.0569

From the Infant Classroom - Our babies are having so much fun in the infant room where their teachers sing songs, read many stories, dance to music, play with toys and encourage their development everyday.  The babies are happy and love the classroom colors and bright sunlight.  Some of the infants are sitting, others are rolling over, standing and a couple are talking their first steps!  Every day the infants surprise the teachers with new developmental milestones and we all love to see the babies grow and learn. 
From the Toddler 1 Classroom - Fall is here and the days are getting shorter and colder.  The children love going outside to play on the playground and with winter around the corner, the children get cold a little quicker but are enjoying the change in seasons.  The teachers keep the toddlers busy by introducing a letter of the week and weekly seasonal themes.  The children are involved with activities utilizing hand coordination by coloring, painting, tracing, gluing and filling in shapes with different colored objects.  The toddlers greatly enjoyed making pizza during "Pp" week.  All by themselves they spooned sauce on the pizza shells, spread cheese over the sauce then after they were cooked, the children loved eating the pizza's they made.  Our toddlers love the cooking days and have been very creative with food  items like pasta, pudding, pretzels, donuts, and monkey bread.  How they love their cooking classes. The toddler 1 classroom will continue to learn about how important it is to be united with friends and family.
From the Toddler 2 Classroom - Here in T2 we are settling into the new school year with all sorts of new activities planned for the fall season.   The teachers are introducing the children to a letter of the week by exposing them to themed activities, cooking projects, hands on art activities, along with stories and music about the letter of the week.  The first three letters we introduced were B, M, and D.  During "Bb" week the children explored special baking activities and a day of bubbles.  The children had a blast with our music and movement unit during "Mm" week where they enjoyed listening and dancing to music from around the world.  They also made their own music with instruments they made themselves.  While talking about the letter "Dd", the children began a farm unit.  They learned about the different types of farms, daily duties farmers perform and learned about farm animals.  We played a listening game where we galloped like a horse, rolled like a pig, grazed like a cow and waddled like a duck.
From the Preschool Classroom - During September, we enjoyed getting to know each other, discovered our 5 senses with fun activities like taste testing, smelling yummy and stinky smells, and using all 5 senses as we made blueberry muffins.  The preschoolers also talked about our families and that we are all glued together with something special called love.  Towards the end of the month we welcomed fall with some "magic tricks".  Did you know you can balance an egg on it's end on the first day of autumn?  We also made "magic leaves."  They are hanging in our windows facing the parking lot - be  sure to check them out.  The preschoolers continue to be exposed to the alphabet and the sounds each letter makes.  The preschoolers put the letter of the day on their "letter tree" and are involved with activities and crafts which revolve around the letter of the week.  During "Pp" week, the preschoolers really enjoyed making pizza because pizza is the director's favorite food and she was so proud of them and enjoyed eating it with them.

Well, spring did finally end but summer seemed to take a long time to start.  As we all know, summer brought lots of rain which did not harm to our outdoor classroom gardens.   Earlier in the spring, the children planted their seedlings into the gardens along with many donations from family and friends.  Together, the seedlings have grown at a remarkable rate and are all so very healthy.  As our own home gardens did not fare as well, the gardens the children planted have prospered.  We grew strawberries, although again we shared them with the local chipmunks, and zucchini squash, different types of tomatoes, cucumbers, green beans and lots of sage!  We also started a new classroom garden this year, which next year will be our very own pumpkin patch.  At this time, in the new garden, we are growing bush beans, sunflowers and lettuce.  This garden area used to be the daycare's sandbox, but because it was in the sun and had no shelter for the children, we transferred it into a new garden and purchased a new sandbox for them.  The new sandbox is under our canopy completed shaded from the sun's harmful rays.  Plus the new sandbox has a cover which keeps all unwanted items out of it.  The children absolutely love the new sand.  Some of the younger children completely lay flat on the new white sand as if they were at the beach.

Summer time did bring many sad goodbyes to the graduating preschoolers but also brought the arrival of many new babies.  As summer quickly comes to an end, we look forward to another great school year with many new faces in the center and lots of happy children and staff.