And just like that, we are at the end of March! Happy Nowruz! Last week, one of our Honeybee moms, Mash Gaud, helped us celebrate Nowruz on the first day of spring, and this week we started off the week with real spring weather, getting all the way up to 70 degrees!

Our focus this week turned to the Spring Egg Hunt, and all three classes started making some beautiful decor for our Bunny’s throne room, i.e. the Movement Room! One week from tomorrow, next Saturday, April 5th at 10 am will be our All School Spring Egg Hunt and it takes place all throughout The Garden campus. The Bunny will be handing out a little memento in the Movement Room, after our hunters find their eggs. Sign up to let us know how many hunters to expect in each area. We will have alum/elementary, Honeybee, Cricket, Ladybug and Toddler hunting areas. We also invite all those that have enrolled to be Garden students in the fall. We hope to have a wonderful turnout at this wonderful kickoff to Spring!

Thank you to our parents this week who helped us out at work parties to primp and preen our garden areas to pretty up the grounds. It’s beautiful!

Ladybugs
We had a wonderful work party on Tuesday. Thank you so much for coming in and helping us ‘spring clean’ our garden beds. We had 4 moms and 2 teachers weeding and pruning. It looks wonderful!
We started a new peekaboo book, “Rain, Rain, Go Away”, and Cari painted the children’s feet to start our Egg Hunt decorations! Hope you all sign up to join us on Saturday the 5th at 10am.

Crickets
Whew! These Crickets came to school on Monday with spring fever! High energy, pretty loud chirping, and jumping all over the place! Crickets!

This week, we started listening to different versions of “Henny Penny”, also called “Chicken Little”. An acorn falls on the hen’s head and she immediately proclaims that the sky is falling! Several farm birds follow along to give this news to the King! The fowl run into a sly fox, who listens intently to where his favorite main dishes are heading, and offers them a short cut to the King through his den where Mrs. Fox and their children are hungrily waiting.

We celebrated Hudson’s 4th trip around the sun on Wednesday and had a work party on Wednesday as well! The Courtyard and parking lot garden beds look beautiful! Thank you to all who helped us out!

Honeybees
Wow! What a week! We have officially started our World Culture Unit! The reports from earlier this year have prepared our Bees to be thoughtful researchers, great display makers, clear speakers, and attentive audience members. The World Culture reports are such a wonderful experience for these preschoolers! We’ve heard countless times that as our alums get into 2nd and 3rd grade, they are asked to do a report similar to this, and their teachers cannot believe that they did something like this in preschool! Our graduates are proud and confident and are happy and willing to stand up in front of their classmates and share what they have learned. This week, we completed our “Where I Live” books, and our passports to prepare us for our travels over the next few weeks. We had fun learning our “Continents” song and learned about our seven continents on the map and the globe. We talked about north, south, east and west, and learned how to find those directions on a map, and in our classroom!

A few years ago, one of our alum parents shared with us that she was a parent helper in her 1st graders’ classroom. As she was ‘mailing’ the kids papers to their mailboxes, she noticed that all the mailboxes had a few stickers on them, but there were 4 that had 15 or 20 stickers on them. She asked the teacher what the stickers were for, and the teacher explained that the students receive a sticker each time they stand in front of the class to share what they learned, recite a poem, or explain how they completed their homework. The alum mom looked at the 4 mailboxes and found that they were the four children who graduated from the Honeybee class together. Our Garden students graduate confident and comfortable to share what they have learned. The elementary school teachers have come to recognize The Garden students. They find the teachers’ eyes when they are talking to them, they are typically the class leaders and they are wonderful problem solvers. We are so proud of our graduates!

The kids didn’t have class on Tuesday so that the teachers could conference with our Honeybee parents. Thank you everyone for signing up and showing up at your time slot to do what we love best – talk and brag about our Honeybee students! There were tears shed, as always, as the teachers realize that this is our last time to conference about these Bees! They are all doing so well, and we can’t believe how much growth we have seen this year. As always, if you have any questions or concerns or ideas, please feel free to reach out and contact us by email, text or in the gazebo! We will always work with you to find the best way to help your child. We are so proud to be a part of your village. We sent home some articles that we were given by the Issaquah School District on kindergarten readiness and ways that you can help your Gardener get ready this summer for this next big step in their formal education. We hope you take a few minutes to read through the articles and let us know if you have any questions. We are confident that our preschool students, with their social emotional skills, are ready to take on the challenge of the new year.

We worked on ‘it’ books, little flip books that add different letters to the beginning of ‘it’ to make fit, sit, bit, hit, kit, lit, and pit. These are wonderful tools to work on rhyming and work on sounding out simple three letter words. Can you believe your little 5 year old is reading? Keep working on it at home. Point out Stop signs and ask them to sound it out. Talk about starting letters and ending letters. Show them two words, like sit and fit and ask which one is ‘fit’. Show them fan and fat and ask which word is fat. Magnetic letters on the refrigerator are fun ways for them to explore sounds. They will make crazy links of letters and ask you what they say. Show them how you sound out ‘sfgltmp’, sounding out each letter. They will giggle, but they will also develop an understanding of how you piece together each sound.

The Bees had a wonderful time up in the forest on Thursday! We had a lot of tree work done last week to clean up after the bomb cyclone, and we have not been able to play up there safely much this school year, so it felt good to have nice long explorations on the trails again.

Have a great weekend everyone!