We had a great week thinking about Autumn, investigating seeds, learning yoga poses, doing exciting math exercises and making music!

We started the week by reading, “How Groundhogs Garden Grew” and “Growing Vegetable Soup.” Then we looked at some seeds in the vegetables that Tammy had brought in from her garden and discussed the seed life cycle. We had some experienced gardeners who knew just what it takes to make great vegetable soup. This should come in handy during Stone Soup time.

On Wednesday one of our parents came in during Music/Movement time and did some yoga with the students! They learned a great song about practicing yoga and used their bodies and imaginations to become different animals.

We have two exciting art projects the children can choose to work on. Our first one is leaf art. We first went on a leaf hunt around the school grounds to collect leaves. Children studied the leaves and drew or traced their favorite with a fine point ink pen. Once everyone has completed this we are going to scan and print several copies for each child and then have them decorate the leaf copies with different materials: watercolor paints, tempera paints, markers, colored pencils, etc. We hope it will be a fun process and be useful in exposing them to different art mediums.

We then discussed the different colors and shapes we saw and everyone agreed that “Castle and Sun” was a good name for the painting. They were then able to make their own version of “Castle and Sun” and they created some beautiful work! This activity will stay out over the next couple weeks and will be introduced to the morning students.

During music we talked about different ways we can make music. We thought of using our body: clapping, snapping, stomping feet and singing. We also thought of the different instruments we can use to make music. We had a great time experimenting with this by doing our clapping rhythm activities, singing songs, playing the really BIG drum and using our maracas, triangles and rhythm sticks.