“Everybody’s got a love bug” at little squirrels.

Hello, Little Squirrels families!

I want to start by apologizing for the quiet spell on the blog these past few weeks. Things have been extra busy as we settled into our new house! But we’re back and excited to share all the fun we’ve been having at Little Squirrels.

As we wrapped up our winter-themed learning with snowflakes and snowmen, we eagerly transitioned into our February theme: Valentines and all things love, kindness, sharing, and friendship!

Here’s a peek at what we’ve been up to:

The Snowmen Letters Turned to Hearts 💕 Our alphabet fun continues, but now our snowmen have melted away and been replaced with heart-shaped letters!

🍥A Valentines Sweets Shop 🍰 Our play kitchen got a festive makeover, transforming into a Valentines sweets shop where little bakers can whip up delicious pretend treats for their friends.

💘Sensory Bin Fun💘 The sensory bin is now overflowing with hearts for a fun and messy scoop-and-pour experience! The rice in the winter bin was so messy, it was getting EVERYWHERE. I don’t know what it is about toddlers and messy play, but I opted for something a little bigger and less messy this month. Of course that means they aren’t engaging in it as well as they usually do, so I’ll probably add some rice or something in soon

🎨Homemade Playdough Fun 🎨 We mixed up fresh batches of homemade playdough in beautiful shades of pink, purple, and red, adding special Valentines tidbits to our playdough tray for extra creative play.

❤️Counting with Love❤️ Weve been practicing our numbers with the sweetest little mini hearts! The children are working on counting, number recognition, and one-to-one correspondence by matching the correct number of hearts to each valentine numeral. This hands-on activity helps them understand that numbers represent actual amounts plus, its a fun way to bring math into our Valentines theme! We also moved into counting to 10 since a lot of our friends are mastering 1-5. We are still doing our fun 1-5 songs because they all love that and some of the younger kiddos are still working hard to master thisbut we’ve added in counting to 10 with our cute little love bugs, and valentines game.

🌈Heart Color Matching 🌈 Our little learners have also been practicing their colors by matching hearts! From bright reds to soft pinks and deep purples, they’ve been sorting and pairing hearts to strengthen their color recognition skills. This playful activity helps with visual discrimination and early categorization all while celebrating the love-filled month of February!

📚Sweet Stories📚 We’ve been reading heartwarming books like Kindness to Share from A-Z, Happy Valentines Day, Mouse!, and The 12 Days of Valentines to reinforce the themes of love and generosity.

This month, our focus is on sharing, kindness, and being a good friends lessons that extend far beyond February! We’ll continue our Valentines fun all month long, finding new ways to show appreciation for our friends and family.

🎶Singing Our Hearts Out! 🎶 Music is always a big part of our day, and this month we’ve been singing some extra sweet songs! We’ve been counting to 10 with the song 10 Little Love Bugs (a fun song we made up!), singing 5 Little Hearts with a new fun counting prop the kids can take turns removing the hearts as we count down. https://youtu.be/n5noNWgcAAE

And of course, no Valentines season would be complete without my absolute favorite Raffi song Love Bug!https://youtu.be/KeaoM-Q_968

These songs help us practice counting, rhythm, and language skills while spreading lots of love and joy.

Because I skipped some weeks in the blog, but did take pictures, I’m going to leave a little photo dump below with some more of our January winter photos I took.

We’re so grateful for this wonderful community and excited for all the love-filled learning ahead! Stay tuned for more updates, and as always, thank you for sharing your little ones with us.

Warmly,

Ms Sarah

May the world be filled with beautiful, peaceful little children.

Book Wishlist

https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/33APNRBIR7BTX?ref_=wl_share

Supplies Wishlist

https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/2DYCRBSREZ3YZ?ref_=wl_share