We’ve been learning about the parts of the tree and talking about maple sugaring. Many children made beautiful tree books, cutting out pictures of the tree and matching labels to the shaded portion: leaves, branches, roots and trunk. We learned that cold nights and warm days make sap run, that about 40 gallons of sap equal 1 gallon of maple syrup and that you can’t tap a tree that is too old or too young. We learned that sap keeps the trees from freezing in the winter and did an experiment freezing plain water and sugared water to see what happens. See if your child remembers the difference in freezing between the plain water and the water with sugar.

We’ve also talked about Spring and enjoyed reading books about hatching ducks and planting sunflowers. We learned about the life cycle of a sunflower and on Thursday everyone got the chance to plant their own sunflower seed. Hopefully they will sprout and we can watch them begin to grow!

The children were excited about Easter and enjoyed some Easter practical life activities. We put different beans, beads and grains in plastic Easter eggs and matched them by sound, we enjoyed Easter play dough cutters and a Easter bunny peg board to practice fine motor skills.

On Wednesday we blew through straws and experimented with how much force was needed to move different objects. We realized it was easy to move feathers, beads, cotton balls or anything light but it was much harder to move heavier objects. The children realized if they had a partner (or two, or three) they were able to move the heavier objects when they blew through their straws together.

We then used our straws to blow around food coloring on some paper eggs and made the most beautiful Easter eggs!

During music we’ve been singing, performing a Spring pantomime, going on “A Bear Hunt” and working on some folk dancing!