What a wonderful week we had at The Garden! Spring is officially here, and we spent as much time outside in the sun as we could while it was still sunny. Happy Nowruz to those that celebrate Persian New Year! The Crickets enjoyed having Rumi’s mum, Mash, come into circle on Monday to teach us about Nowruz and how Persians celebrate the first day of Spring.

We’ve noticed big emotional swings in our Honeybees at this time of year. The kids are realizing that this is their last egg hunt, leprechaun day, etc., and they are hearing more talk at home about Kindergarten – with assessments, talking with students about who might be in their Kindergarten class, and with the warm sun injecting energy, and also making us sleepy!  – we’ve started to see a lot of emotions. Please check out The Garden’s article on our curriculum page about Honeybee emotions (both parents and students) during the transition from The Garden to Kindergarten and at this time of year.      

For Crickets and Bugs, we are also seeing the ‘change’ from Bug to Cricket and Cricket to Bee. We see the exact same cycles every year and yet, it always surprises us! Our little Ladybugs are beginning to reach out to peers to play together instead of parallel play. Crickets are beginning to understand that if their best friend is absent, they can play with someone else, and if their best friend is playing with someone else, we can be okay with that. Our Honeybees have grown from having a best friend to having a ‘team of friends’ and our two teams in the Honeybees are now merging, making the entire class one big team. The same thing happens every year, and the staff is always so pleased to see it happening.

We had our March Board meeting on Tuesday Evening and had our Cricket conferences on Wednesday morning, and we had a Movie night at Teacher Donna’s on Wednesday evening. Thanks to everyone who made this busy week’s events go smoothly!

Read on for class news.

Ladybugs

What a fun first day of spring we celebrated with these Ladybugs! We read about Nowruz, Persian New Year, which occurs on the first day of spring every year and we made beautiful Spring crowns. We loved seeing our little ‘bunnies’ decorating the courtyard and had fun beginning to take turns to go out to Brin’s office to be interviewed for our “artist’s biographies” which will be displayed next to our works of art at our Spring Art Show. We are learning a new dance that we will perform at the Spring Art Show, and we started learning a new nursery rhyme, Baa Baa Black Sheep.

Crickets

How fun to have Rumi’s mum, Mash, teach us about Nowruz! Mash did such a great job explaining the Persian New Year and our Crickets prepared a Haft seen table to surprise her. The Crickets found 7 items that started with “S” to put on our table – stapler, Squirrely, Snail, snake, scissors, snowflake, and square – and Mash was so pleased to see our Haft seen. She read a sweet book that told us all about Nowruz, and then led us in making our beautiful spring crowns. Happy first day of spring! On Wednesday, we had our Cricket parent teacher conferences, and the teachers always enjoy chatting with the parents about your lovely 4 year olds. Please know that if you have any questions or concerns, you don’t have to wait for conferences – ask us any time – we can always find a way to touch base with you.

We had fun painting our Egg Hunt Eggs – a combination of foam paint and bio colors – blending the beautiful colors and then scraping off the excess paint – they make a beautiful almost marbled effect. We hope you enjoy these Spring decorations and display them each year when the calendar turns to spring.

Honeybees

What a beautiful Monday! We spent almost the entire class time outside, snack included. We made beautiful birthday pictures for our friend, Mira, whom we celebrated her fifth trip around the sun on Thursday.

We made beautiful Nowruz crowns on Tuesday to celebrate Persian New Year and the first day of spring! Brook explained at circle on Monday about the equinox on Monday where day and night are exactly equal, and on Tuesday, we started Spring, where the days start to become longer than night. We worked with patterns and created our own patterns to decorate our huge Egg Hunt carrots!

We had some fabulous World Culture reports this week. Liam took us to Spain, Maverick took us to China, Tillson took us to Syria and Charlotte took us to Mexico.

Isn’t this fun? We are learning so much about our world and our families! We started working on our self-portraits for the Art Show and are beginning to talk about our Art Show dance performances. It is an exciting time of the year for so many reasons.

We have noticed some strong emotions in our Honeybee class, and we typically find the same emotions each year at this time. Kids are attending their Kindergarten roundups and assessments and are not only excited about the new ventures ahead of them, but beginning to realize that their time with their Garden classmates and their adventures at their preschool are coming to an end. They are looking at their last leprechaun day, their last egg hunt, their last butterfly tea, and are feeling pretty fragile. Parents, too, are feeling fragile. We would love for you to read our article about the Children’s Garden Student Journey that speaks about their transition from The Garden to Elementary School.