Stuffy Sleepover at the BOOK FAIR
ON MONDAY 28TH, WE ARE HOSTING ANOTHER STUFFY SLEEPOVER!!
What is a Stuffy Sleepover? We are glad you asked!
Kids bring their favorite toy. It can be a stuffed animal, a doll, an action-figure, an excavator! They leave them in the loving care of our teachers for a night of music, books, and awesome activities. Kids can watch their favorite toys play with their best friends’ favorite toys from either Facebook Live or YouTube.
Basically, it is a heartfelt way for kids to be together without BEING together.
We had seen them before, Scrawl Books does an especially fun series of them featuring amazing children’s authors.
They are ridiculous fun for everyone involved. CHECK OUT OUR VIDEOS FROM THAT NIGHT ON OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL
STUFFY SLEEPOVER VIDEOS
OUR THEME THIS TIME IS FALL FUN! We will be doing Autumn crafts, reading Autumn books, and singing fun songs that may or may not be Autumn themed, but DEFINITELY sing-a-long-worthy!!
Then, in the morning, all our stuffed animals will board the Common Ground bus and be returned to their best friends with stories to tell and goodies to share.
Sign Up Right Here!
$30.00 Donation to our COMMON GROUND GIVING TUESDAY Campaign gets you a ticket for the stuffy sleepover! It includes the goodie-bags, the fun, the live-videos, and more surprises!
Then you can drop your stuffed animal off on Monday the 28th AT THE BOOK FAIR and it can be picked up on Tuesday, November 29th!
The money raised will go towards necessary educational initiatives at Common Ground Childcare.
This is our favorite way to be with you, even when we are apart! Thank you so much for being a part of our community.
Miss LJ
SIGN UP FOR OUR FALL FUN STUFFY SLEEPOVER!!
ON MONDAY NOVEMBER 28th, WE ARE HOSTING ANOTHER STUFFY SLEEPOVER AT THE BOOK FAIR!!
What is a Stuffy Sleepover? We are glad you asked!
The Stuffy Sleepover kicks off our Book Fair and our Giving Tuesday Campaign. Kids bring their favorite toy. It can be a stuffed animal, a doll, an action-figure, an excavator! They leave them in the loving care of Miss LJ, Mr. Josh, Miss Janette, Miss Liz, and Miss Victoria for a night of music, books, and awesome activities at the Book Fair. Kids can watch their favorite toys play with their best friends’ favorite toys from either Facebook Live or YouTube. Then their favorite friend will ready for pick up at our BOOK FAIR!
Basically, it is a heartfelt way for kids to be together without BEING together.
We had seen them before, Scrawl Books does an especially fun series of them featuring amazing children’s authors.
They are ridiculous fun for everyone involved. CHECK OUT OUR VIDEOS FROM THAT NIGHT ON OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL
STUFFY SLEEPOVER VIDEOS
OUR THEME THIS TIME IS FALL FUN! We will be doing Autumn crafts, reading Autumn books, and singing fun songs that may or may not be Autumn themed, but DEFINITELY sing-a-long-worthy!!
Then, in the morning, all our stuffed animals will board the Common Ground bus and be returned to their best friends with stories to tell and goodies to share.
Sign Up Right Here!
$30.00 Donation to our COMMON GROUND GIVING TUESDAY Campaign gets you a ticket for the stuffy sleepover! It includes the goodie-bags, the fun, the live-videos, and more surprises!
Then you can drop your stuffed animal off on Monday the 28th at the center. It will “sleepover” that night at the Book Fair, then be picked up by your child the next morning.
The money raised will go towards necessary educational initiatives at Common Ground Childcare as part of our Giving Tuesday Campaign.
This is our favorite way to be with you, even when we are apart! Thank you so much for being a part of our community.
CG Birthday: How to Celebrate with Us!
We are turning 49 on April 6th, but we are celebrating ALL MONTH LONG!!
Normally this would warrant one of our excellent all-school events with food trucks, moon bounces, a giant cake, maybe a carnival…
But since we can’t do that, we are finding a ton of new, exciting ways to celebrate, and we want to tell you how you can join us from your own home.
Sign up for our Spring Stuffy Sleepover!
Our featured author Andrea Lamont will be doing a reading of her new book “The Friendship Rock” for the stuffys and their kiddo friends at home. This event is a total blast that we really think is a perfect way to celebrate together while apart.
Participate in and Share our Book Fair!
From April 12th-April19th, 24/7, you can participate in our Online Book Fair with Scrawl Books! There will be readings, book recommendations, and wish lists! Whether you are supporting your classroom, buying your kids’ new favorite book, or finding your next “relax by the fire pit” Spring read, any book you buy supports our fundraising efforts to raise money for our Non-Profit mission. The best birthday present you can give Common Ground is helping us raise money for our educational efforts.
Host your own Fundraiser on Facebook!
Our Non-Profit missions benefit our students, our teachers, our outreach, our support of much needed educational reform. By supporting our beloved school, we are also supporting our community! Helping us raise money to support those efforts is an AMAZING WAY to help us celebrate our birthday.
Here is our Our PayPal Donation Link where anyone can donate! Thank you for widening our impact.
You can Celebrate “The Week of the Young Child” with us!
We have several activities we are doing with all of the children at the center, but here are some ideas for how to celebrate at home!
Music Monday: Instead of turning on the tv when you get home, turn on the stereo and have a dance party!! Show your kids your favorite songs, and let them show you theirs, make a big Youtube playlist of your favorites, dance your heart out!
Pro Tip: Eighties Pop makes great Dance Music, here is our Owl’s Spotify List.
Struggling to come up with songs? Check out our Mister Josh Rock at the Blocks series on Youtube!
Tasty Tuesday: THROW YOUR OWN COMMON GROUND BIRTHDAY PARTY!! We know putting together something complicated on a Tuesday night feel like it’ll take more energy than you have, so you can always save this for a free weekend day. Whether you decide to try it on a weeknight, or a weekend, this does not have to be over the top to be special with your kiddos. Big Bird has a super easy Banana Bread Recipe! Make healthy banana bread “cupcakes,” stick candles in them, sing Happy Birthday, and chow down!
Work Together Wednesday: At school we will be planting our new class gardens!! We encourage you to plant local, pollinator-friendly plants with your kiddo so they can contribute to a healthy environment. Every little act brings great goodness to the world, and if your kid learns that early with you, they will be more confident and ready to do more and more each day.
Artsy Thursday: Draw chalk art on your sidewalk. Send postcards to family members you haven’t seen awhile with pictures from your kids. Let your kids paint with ice cubes or paint rocks to leave on your local trails. Any little art project that you do with your kid is time spent creating something lovely in the world, no matter what your skill level is. This is also a perfect opportunity to show teacher appreciation: If you want to make your teacher’s day, have your kiddo make an art project for them telling their teacher just how much they matter.
Family Friday: Movie Night! Family Walk! Shadow Charades! Board games! If you want to make it Common Ground themed, this is a fine night to throw the CG Birthday Party! You can also do a “name that teacher” guessing game.
All-Smiles Saturday: Sign your kids up for our Saturday Session on April 10th! While your kids are partying it up with us, you can relax, go on a date, do some much needed yard work, finish that 1000 piece puzzle you’ve been saving, anything that makes you smile!
HOWEVER: If SPRING CLEANING without interruption is what really makes your Saturday perfect, we highly suggest saving any gently used clothing/linens, small household appliances, personal accessories, and books for our JUNE FUND-DRIVE DONATION EVENT! By cleaning out your houses and freeing up your space, you could earn your school BIG MONEY. It’s our favorite type of “fundraiser,” because it is a WIN WIN WIN. You get a cleaned out bureau and don’t create more waste, we get much needed funds for our various educational objectives, and someone gets much needed “new to them” items for an affordable price from UNIQUE without creating more waste.
Whatever you do to celebrate, however you do it, please send us pictures. We would love to make a huge birthday picture collage for the center to show all the ways we honored Common Ground Childcare. Show us your cakes, your decorations, your art projects and gardens! Whatever it looks like, it was done with love, and that is everything to us.
Love Love Love,
Your CG Family
P.S. Let us know how you plan on participating on Common Ground’s Birthday in the Comments!
Birthday at CG: Our SPRING STUFFY SLEEPOVER!
April is our Birthday Month! And to give it a GRAND FINALE, we are hosting another SUPER POPULAR SPRING STUFFY SLEEPOVER!
What is a Stuffy Sleepover? We are glad you asked!
Kids bring their favorite toy. It can be a stuffed animal, a doll, an action-figure, an excavator! They leave them in the loving care of our teachers for a night of music, books, and awesome activities. Kids can watch their favorite toys play with their best friends’ favorite toys from either Facebook Live or YouTube.
Basically, it is a heartfelt way for kids to be together without BEING together.
We had seen them before, Scrawl Books does an especially fun series of them featuring amazing children’s authors.
They are ridiculous fun for everyone involved. CHECK OUT OUR VIDEOS FROM THAT NIGHT ON OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL
STUFFY SLEEPOVER VIDEOS
On Friday, April 30th, the stuffies will come into Common Ground for a night of fun! This time, we are going to have our Mr. Josh sing-a-long around a CAMP FIRE! We will roast marshmallows, look at the stars, and read books about Spring. We will play outside, eat delicious snacks, and make something delightful for our kids at home. After that, we will camp out under the stars and dream of adventures with our Common Ground Family.
Our Featured Author is the warm-hearted, endlessly talented Andrea Lamont.
We will be reading her book “The Magic Friendship Rock,” a lovely story about imagination, art, and the absolute magic of friendship. The stuffys will bring home a copy of this book along with some other fun story-themed surprises to share with their friends.
The next morning on the First of May we will take all the stuffed animals (and other friends) home on the Common Ground Bus with a delightful goodie bag to share with their kiddo to remind them of all the fun things they did the night before.
Does this sound amazing? It does to us too. We could barely wait until Spring to party with all our magnificent stuffy friends again!
Sign Up Right Here!
$30.00 Donation to our COMMON GROUND BIRTHDAY Campaign gets you a ticket for the stuffy sleepover! It includes the goodie-bags, the fun, the live-videos, and more surprises!
Then you can drop your stuffed animal off on Thursday the 29th or Friday the 30th at the center (we will email you with the details when you register!) and it will be delivered home via the Common Ground Bus!
The money raised will go towards necessary educational initiatives at Common Ground Childcare.
In the spirit of OUR BIRTHDAY, since we cannot all BE together, at least we can celebrate together.
Miss LJ
#GiveFundsGiveTime: GIVING TUESDAY IS HERE
December 1st, 2020 is probably one of the strangest, loveliest, and most necessary Giving Tuesdays since its inception in 2012. The world is wracked by a pandemic. Unemployment has been at an all time high. An unmatched 12 named storms, including a record-tying six hurricanes, have made landfall in the United States this year alone.
We are quarantine-fatigued, decision-fatigued, anxiety-fatigued. Traditions are changed, family visits are reliant on internet connections.
It is in the midst of this unique adversity that we find our most profound strength, our brightest hope, our purest joy.
We have stood together, protecting one another with masks and distance. We have created new traditions out of whole cloth that will withstand the test of time. We have rallied around our small businesses, our schools, our communities to provide whatever support we can, even though it never seems like enough.
THAT is what our Giving Tuesday #GiveFundsGiveTime campaign has been all about.
We raised over $4,000.00 for our programs (and still have $3,000 of matching funds available!) and had such an incredible time doing it. If you are reading this on #GivingTuesday, you can still donate to our cause with double the impact HERE.
We had so much fun during the sleepover. Our kiddos left their best stuffed friends in care of Mr. Josh, Ms. Janette, Ms. Liz, and Ms. LJ, your CIRCLE TIME crew! We spent the evening dancing, singing, doing art, eating popcorn, and sending pictures/videos of the whole thing to the students while they were safe at home! APART DOES NOT MEAN ALONE, Friends and Families!
If you didn’t see the ridiculous good time that was our STUPENDOUS STUFFY SLEEPOVER, you are missing out… BUT YOU DON’T HAVE TO MISS OUT NEXT TIME! We will be doing more of these.
You can download a copy of the one-of-a-kind stuffy sleepover coloring book where we featured each of the animals present (along with your circle time friends!)
Check out the fantastical highlights of our Stuffy Sleepover HERE.
This event was a perfect representation of the #GiveTime part of our campaign, what we consider to be the KEY and MOST VITAL part. We wanted to give our kids something to look forward to in uncertain times, to give them a new tradition that they can share with their friends no matter what is going on in the world outside. Each of us gave a little bit. Scrawl Books gave us ideas and goodies for our bags. Pal Dentistry gave us toothbrushes for our stuffys and instructions on how to keep our teeth healthy! We would also love to thank our local author Wayne Truax and family members Mary and Richard Badley for the wonderful addition of Mouse, The Man, and the MGB to our evening (and our goodiebags!)
Last, but not least, Our wonderful families gave us faith, time, money, and their happiness made our giving feel like receiving something warm and full of love.
We have written a lot in the last few weeks on how to Give Time to the people around you that matter, and we will continue to do so. This was just the jump start to our Giving Muscle Fitness Program! We want you to keep at it. Keep giving those five minutes a day. Give yourself five minutes because you are worth it. Give attention to your family for five minutes because you’ll suddenly find that it’s your favorite part of the day. Keep giving it until suddenly it’s seven minutes. Then ten. You will inspire others to do the same, and your reach will expand far beyond your wildest dreams.
We have dug deep into our hearts and not been found wanting. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you for making #GivingTuesday2020 so incredible.
Love and Regards,
Ms. LJ