Our Week at a Glance: This Week Children’s Choice at Manzano Mesa will continue to focus on emergent activities. As a Children’s Choice community, we started a Children’s Choice how-to-play Chess book, and we plan to continue to work on it, and make it friendly for all ages. We hope you are enjoying our new emergent curriculum! Be sure to check out all the amazing activities and projects that happened this past week!

Sophia G. (Age 6) Announcements: -5th Grade Graduation will be held on 5/25, if you are able to This is Sophia, she has been coming to Children’s donate any needed items, Choice for 2 years. Her favorite thing to do at please check-in with Monique.

Children’s Choice is to hang out with the staff. She -CC’s last day is the 25th! really enjoys doing fun stuff with Hunter. Sophia -We will be celebrating stated, “Hunter is actually really funny. He does weird with a 5th Grade dances, makes me laugh, and wears weird socks.” Graduation! If you have a 5th grader, please plan When Sophia grows up, she wants to be a stylist. She to send them to CC on is passionate about hair, makeup, and nails. After the 25th!

talking some more, Sophia expressed that she wants -For Drop-Off/Pick-Up, please to learn how to braid hair. So, Monique, Site Director, wear a mask, walk up to the is working on a Hair Braiding workshop to kick-start Cafeteria main entrance, and her learning. call (505)974-9321. Do not enter the building, this is for Sophia really enjoys participating in activities at your safety and ours. Children’s Choice. Her favorite one so far has been the -Children’s Choice Company GIANT Frog project. She also likes making magnet Wide Amazon Wish List: cakes with her friend Aubree, and then going to the https://www.amazon.com/hz/ drama area to eat them. wishlist/ls/2GAACFJAYM51V ?ref_=wl_share Sophia is very confident in her cake making ability, in -Class Dojo Registration: fact, if she was in charge of making dinner for her https://www.classdojo.com/invi family, she would bake a strawberry cake with te/?c=CPHFNV9 chocolate frosting! Children’s Choice is happy to have the very fashionable Sophia in our community!

Helpful Information Site Phone: 505-974-9321 Office Phone: 296-2880 Site Email: [email protected]

Financial Assistance Available: 841-4800

The GIANT Chronicles continues! The Manzano Mesa Community is still inspired to make GIANT origami creations, and failures have not slowed us down, they only made us more creative! Noah (age 10) and Kayla (age 11) started working on a GIANT origami Swan. They challenged themselves to do it in only 30 minutes! They taped precisely, folded, and maneuvered the into a truly GIANT swan. However, the swan made out of was actually unsuccessful, due to the flimsiness of the origami paper. This surprised the community because the GIANT frog was less successful due to the rigidness of the . Community members surrounded their two peers to see how it would all turn out, Sophia (age 6) was surprised to see that the swan couldn’t sit up on its own. She stated, “That’s so weird, I really thought the origami paper would work better!” As a community we brainstormed, and got to an educated guess, that the more folds a creation has should use the origami paper, and the less folds a creation has would work better with construction paper.

This week, we also started to carefully tape together the green origami paper, to attempt our GIANT Frog one more time. Jason (Age 8) noticed that this origami paper is much thinner in comparison to the origami paper we currently have. We are being extra precise during the taping step to ensure the giant square is just like one solid paper. After brainstorming, we have an educated guess or hypothesis, that we will have more success with the thinner origami paper. Be sure to check back in next week to see if our GIANT Origami Frog 2.0 is a success.

In our morning program, the community started to experiment with chalk, and the different creations they can make out of chalk. This activity started off with Rebekah, Caregiver, bringing out a set of chalk, and some butcher paper. The kiddos quickly started experimenting. They first experiment they did consi sted of using the chalk like colored pencils, to transfer color onto the butcher paper. They realized that using chalk made it very easy to mix and layer the colors, very similar to acrylic paint or oil pastels. This week we also dabbled in some new hair styles. Monique, Site Creations were made using their hands Director, enjoys wearing her hair in and the calk tips. The children were so two “pig-tail braids”- Kayla (Age 11). excited to continue the activity, they Some of the Children’s Choice made a banner for the 5th grade community were really impressed to graduation. learn that Monique braids her own We are excited to see what other chalk hair. This sparked interest, and a few creations can be made! Check in next girls within the program were very week for more chalk projects. interested in getting their hair braided.

Next week Monique plans on creating an activity that teaches the kiddos how to do a simple braid, and later hopefully a French, Dutch, and fish-tail braid.

Jason (age 8) has been super creative when it comes to making origami creations. Look at his sea dragon!

It is made from origami bunnies, cicadas, and a swan. This creation was not something that Jason saw on TV, or in a book. He simply started making a lot of bunnies, and he noticed their ears made a cool spiky spine looking thing, and he just started to add on to it. He did not know it was going to be a sea dragon until he added the neck and head- made out of different colors and sizes of cicadas.

Check out his in-progress sea dragon, nicknamed spikey. Jason plans to add on a horn, and maybe some more cicada rows to increase its spikey-ness.

Our Children’s Choice Chess Rule Book is also coming along, we are struggling with using

wording that is understandable for all ages. To v help with this, we have been asking kiddos from different age groups to help with this chess book. Most of the information is being typed, in hopes of out most of the explanations. Take a look at our progress.

During one of our mornings, the staff decided to bring out some embroidery yarn. We did not tell the kiddos anything, we just sat it out on the table.

The community got right to work and started making friendship bracelets. A lot of the kiddos did not know how to make them, so Rebekah, Caregiver, and Monique, Site Director, helped by asking more questions. Including, “Do you know how to tie your shoes?”-Monique

This question is important because the first step to tying your shoes, is the only step to make a simple bracelet. There are many other ways, but when first starting off it is always a great idea to keep it simple, and it connects world experience to creativity.

This week we did not finish any bracelets, This is Maddie! She is the but we hope to see more progress next newest member of our week. community! She just finished out her first week ever at Children’s Choice.

If she could describe Children’s Choice in one sentence, it would be, “FUN! Because you get to hang out with friends and do tons of creative activities!”

This year, our 5th grade graduation is going to look a little different. Because of the pandemic, our budget is a bit scarce. That does not mean we won’t do it the CC way! We have gotten creative and pulled together as a community to celebrate our 5th grade graduates. However, we need your help! If you can donate any of these items, please let Monique, Site Director know ASAP! Thanks!!