Spring has finally arrived, and it brought us rain, snow, mud, wind, sun, and lots of puddles!

Monday was the initial Seeds and Sunbeams adventure with Michelle and Emily Champigny from Taproot for those participating students. They went sliding down the icy trails, learned how to identify maple trees by looking at the bark and the shape of it’s leaves, explored a tunnel in the snow made by a mouse or vole, touched velvety moss covered rocks and soft ferns, and discovered branches covered in turkey tail mushrooms.

We celebrated a fifth birthday with the birthday girl! She told us she was born in the spring in the month of March five years ago, then walked herself and the globe around the sun five times while we listed the seasons and counted her birthdays before enjoying tasty cupcakes with sprinkles.

Rose warmed us up for sign language with the Firetruck song, then invited children to come up and spell out their names by pointing to the letter signs on the alphabet poster. She reviewed and shared more ocean and water signs then read I Will Surprise My Friend by Mo Willems.

We read A Tale of Two Beasts and talked about how to recognize how others are feeling and acknowledged that we all might have different perspectives about things. We also discussed offering help before stepping in and helping when we see a friend struggling, because sometimes even if it is hard and frustrating we want to do it ourselves, and working through hard things is the best way to learn and improve.

We read the story Swimmy by Leo Lionni about some small fish who work together to stay safe from the bigger fish. We played some ocean games with the parachute. First we made big waves and shook all the ocean puppets off the parachute. Then we put ocean animals under the parachute and took turns going under to get an animal when our names were called. Finally we played great white shark, taking turns going under to chomp on the foot of another child who then became the shark.

Kindergarten students chose their own literacy and math work, practiced reading, worked on their news articles, learned the names of the geometric solids cube, sphere, cone, pyramid, cylinder, and rectangular prism, and played some games to practice identifying objects of those shapes.

Friday students explored the water cycle. We read portions of Rivers of Sunlight by Molly Bang and set up an experiment with hot water that released vapor, which was cooled by a bowl of ice, causing it to condense and then precipitate and collect down in the water. We used our water cycle mat to place arrows showing how the water moves around in the water cycle, precipitating, collecting, evaporating, moving, and condensing.