In following our study of birds, Monday students read a picture book story based on Paul Klee’s painting Cat and Bird. We then watched a short tutorial video about how to draw a bird, modeling how to draw a head, body, beak, legs, wings, tail, eye, and feathers. The children then either used their imaginations or chose a bird photo as a reference and drew a bird. The bird pictures were glorious and included a rainbow bird, colorful eagle, black crows, a chickadee, dark eyed junko, purple bird, and several others.

This is the week of the Iditarod dog sled race in Alaska, so we learned a bit about how it started, with a serum run to bring medication to some children in Nome Alaska with diptheria, and the many dogs and mushers who ran an 800 mile relay to deliver the medicine. We learned some of the terms the mushers use to direct the dogs – hike for go, easy for slow, and woah for stop. The children then chose to be a dog or a musher, and we formed 4 teams then followed directions from the mushers while racing around the yard.

During Sign language with Rose we learned the sign for opposite, then learned some opposite signs, including small & big, tall & short, happy & sad, silly & serious, sweet & sour, left & right, young & old, and new & old. We then learned the signs for Make New Friends. We already knew several of the signs, so the challenge was signing them all fast enough to keep up with Rose!

We celebrated a fifth birthday (wow!) with the birthday girl who was born in March in the season of winter. She walked the globe around the sun while we counted then was serenaded by the Happy Birthday song. Happy birthday 5 year old!

During Spanish we did the marching/body movement song again. It got quite silly as we started to move more and more body parts, starting with our manos (hands) and going all the way to our piernas (legs), caderas (hips), hombros (shoulders), cabezas (heads), ojos (eyes) and lengua (tongue). Zeanny read a story about an abeula (grandmother) who travels all over the world collecting things for her grandchild, then everyone had fun playing the quien comio (who ate) el galleta (the cookie) game.

With the rise in temperatures the snow and ice has started melting, creating lots of wonderful puddles and lots of glorious goopy mud. We watched the water flow from the high ground to the low ground, where it pooled and settled, slowly filtrating into the soil and evaporating in the sun. Susan led us in thinking about how water flows and where it goes. We all watched a stream of water flowing down, pulling silt down with it. We then pretended to be precipitation – either rain or snow – falling and settling on the ground, then melting and flowing downhill before gathering at the bottom. Afternoon students experimented with boats, making them out of paper, mat board, bowls, and paper cups. We had such a wonderful week playing in the water and mud and removing layers to enjoy the warmth and the sun.

Kindergarten students were finally able to get back to a bit of outside work time. They counted the pickets all the way up to 100 days. They used orange paint to paint every 10th picket, just like the orange 10 rods they use in their math work. They painted yellow dots on each picket for the number it represents after each ten, so one dot on the 1 picket, 11 picket, 21 picket, etc. two dots on 2, 12, 22, etc. They took some photos being kooky kids and kids for their K page. They did some straight line letter writing practice, forming their l’s, i’s, w’s, v’s, x’s, etc. One afternoon the afternoon students filled a square with Cuisinaire rods to make a 100 square.

Friday students read and talked about bird beaks, then used 6 different utensils representing different beak types, and 6 types of bird food, to see which type of beak was best for eating which types of food.