Warmer days made outside play lots of fun.  The snow was perfect for snowballs and snowmen and building up our sledding hill.  The hill was busy with sledders and penguins taking turns slipping down to the bottom then running around to do it again.Monday students had a busy morning.  They decorated their Valentine mailbags, wrote Valentine letters to their families, painted their paper mache balloons, and had a health lesson with Zeanny then enjoyed a special dairy treat of yogurt with granola and frozen fruit before heading to the library with Tammy.Valentine’s Day, the day of love and friendship, was introduced.  We read some Valentine stories and the children began to prepare for our party next week by making Valentine mailbags.  We continued to sing our Valentine songs, including Skidamarink, You Are My Sunshine, A Tisket A Tasket, and Mail Myself to You.We introduced letter writing and the Post Office.  We read The Jolly Postman and each child wrote a letter home to one, two, or all of their family members for Valentine’s Day.  They will mail their letters when we take our tour of the US Post Office next Tuesday.We continued to chart our recyclables and trash usage.  We discussed how many recyclables we have been saving from the landfill, and introduced the idea of reducing waste, which we will delve into more in depth next week.Me on the Map was read again, and we introduced the floor map that we are creating of the town of Lancaster.  Susan drew an outline of the central roads and the river, and the children began painting the road gray and river blue.  Next week we will continue to add more detail.Friday students explored their fifth sense, the sense of taste, with a tasting party.  We read about our sense of taste and looked at our taste buds in a mirror.  We learned that there are five categories of taste – sour, sweet, salty, bitter, and umami (meat).  We then washed up, sat at the snack table, and tasted some different foods to determine what they were, and if they would be categorized as sweet, sour, salty, bitter, or umami.  Some of them were pretty difficult to categorize, and we didn’t always agree, but we had fun tasting different flavors.We celebrated a fifth birthday.  The birthday girl told us she was born in the winter, in the month of February, five years ago, so she speedily orbited the earth around the sun while we counted out her age.  After she blew out the candle we enjoyed tasty cupcakes with cashew maple frosting.