Garden Gazette March 10, 2023

News, pictures and videos from the classrooms.

What beautiful weather we kicked off the week with! All three of our classes worked on their adorable Leprechaun Day invitations – Bugs Day is next Tuesday, Bees is next Thursday and Crickets is a week from today. All three events will start at the beginning of class and will last 60-90 minutes. The Ladybugs will go home with their special guests after the 60-90 minutes while the Cricket and the Honeybee students will stay at school after saying goodbye to their special guests.

Auction Ticket QR codes went home with kid mail this week and there is also a QR code in the gazebo and linked in this Gazette. It’s time to get your auction tickets and start planning your groovy get ups! We’ve already seen lots of amazing procurements coming through and can’t wait to see all of your great ideas! We are ready to party like it’s 1977!

Next week, we will begin planning our All School Egg Hunt on April 1^st. Look for committee sign up coming soon.

Don’t forget to spring forward on your clocks this weekend – another sign of spring and sunshine and flowers coming!

Read on for Class News:

Ladybugs

We had fun making our “Baa Baa Black Sheep” booklets and painting rainbows on our Leprechaun Day invitations. Leprechaun Day is a beloved Garden event where a special guest joins us to do a craft, play with us on the playground, look for Leprechaun gold and perform a trick with their Ladybug! This trick can be as simple as an airplane ride, kicking a ball back and forth to each other, twirling up to sit on shoulders, etc. We’ve even had some special guests bring a favorite tune on their phone and dance. The children love showing their grown up around their school and feel very special having that one on one time with them. A special guest can be a parent, a grandparent, an aunt or uncle, or even a sweet neighbor.

On Thursday, we started our final multi step project for our Spring Art Show, based on Eric Carle’s “Very Hungry Caterpillar”. We can’t wait for you to see them! We also sent home our Leprechaun day invitations.

Crickets

The Crickets read a fun story called “It’s Okay to be Different” and then illustrated their own ideas about how it is okay to do things differently. We hope you enjoy their whole class collaboration!

We painted rainbows on our Leprechaun Day invitations. We hope each Cricket can bring a special person to class to do a craft together, hunt for gold and perform a trick at circle time. The trick can be as easy as an airplane ride, a run and flip upside-down trick, or a dance together to a favorite song. We sent home the invitations today in kid mail.

We experimented with different applicators of round things for our exploration of circles in our paintings at the easel, and read some wonderful Mo Willems books that the kids love to giggle along with. We also started reading different versions of Goldilocks and the 3 Bears and on our non-Leprechaun activities next week, we will continue to compare and contrast the stories, act it out and make a stamper book.

Honeybees

Oh, how we love this time of year in the Honeybee class! WORLD CULTURE REPORTS have begun! We have ‘travelled” to Sweden, Iceland, Belarus, Australia, Russia, Columbia and Italy this week. The children are doing incredible presentations! They are using strong clear voices, talking slow and using a pointer, and working hard to teach us all about their wonderful countries. The audience members are doing a fabulous job as well, sitting respectfully, asking good questions and giving great constructive feedback! We are so proud of these 4 and 5 year olds who are doing a presentation worthy of 2^nd or 3^rd graders. Hope you enjoy watching your child’s report that we video record for you, and we all look forward to our World Culture Fair at the end of all of the presentations where you can ‘tour’ all the countries and ask questions of the students yourselves. This date will be announced as we near the end of this unit.

Continuing to expand our understanding of ‘where we live’, we completed our booklets with our planet, Earth. We hope you enjoy their booklets. The teachers were so taken with the Cricket’s book, It’s Okay to be Different, we decided to make one with our Bee class as well. We had fun on Thursday coming up with ideas for each child to illustrate something that it is okay to be different about.

Allie brought in a great ‘V’ sound basket, and we had fun doing another round of ‘Spill the Beans’ with the number 4 and 5. We are so impressed with our students writing the entire alphabet on Thursday, along with 4s, 5s and plus and equal signs. Kindergarten, here they come!

Thursday was a beautiful day, even though it was a bit chilly, and we headed up to the forest for our outdoor play time. The kids love hiking the trails, climbing the trees and playing on the teeter totter, ninja course and building forts with twigs. What a beautiful school we have!

We started off the week painting rainbows on our Leprechaun Day invitations and hope you enjoy those cute little leprechauns under the rainbow! Leprechaun Day for the Honeybees is next Thursday, the 17^th, when a special guest will join each Bee at the beginning of class to work on an art project together, search for mischief and gold on the playground and perform a trick together at circle. The trick can be as simple as telling a knock knock joke, an easy magic trick, getting an airplane ride, a wheelbarrow ride, or dancing to a favorite song. The idea is to have fun together – no pressure.

Hope you enjoy the weekend, Bees! We love to see the flowers starting to spring up.

See you Monday.