What a fun and full week we had at The Garden! We talked about Ramadan in our classes and made our Leprechaun Day invitations. We sent home the February hearts and valentines, and got out the green and rainbow decor. Last weekend sure felt like Spring, and this weekend, we spring our clocks forward, yet another step towards the season of daffodils, crocuses, tulips, birds’ nests, and baby animals, not to mention Leprechaun Day, Egg Hunt, the Spring Art Show, Butterfly Tea and our Spring Gala/Auction!

The children had fun making their thumbprint four leaf clovers and beautiful hand drawn rainbow invitations. Watch the courtyard for their fun Leprechaun faces to be popping up in the next few days. Leprechaun Day at The Garden is one that we lovingly refer to as one of our “Garden High Holy Days” – any day that our special family members join us to play with the students and watch the magic happen in real time, is one of our favorite days of the calendar. We hope you can set aside an hour of your schedule to join us for a memory making day, and start practicing your trick with your Gardener! We can’t wait to see it! We had a few questions about who can come to the event. Traditionally, this has been an event for Dads to join their Gardeners, while the Butterfly Tea is an event for Moms to join us, but it’s open to anyone. You decide what works best for your family. We also want to let you know that Grandparents are always welcome, just give us a heads up so we know how many guests to plan for.

Next week, we begin our parent teacher conferences with the Ladybug class. We look forward to sharing with you all of our notes and findings from our planning session, and all the growth that we have seen in your child and how we can best help everyone going forward.

Read on for class news.

Ladybugs
We filled our class this week to capacity of 16 with a new student, named Presley! Please welcome Presley and her parents, Candis and Brian when you see them in the gazebo.

The Ladybugs started learning some new spring songs about flowers growing, and rainy days, and they brought home their invitations for Leprechaun Day.

Next Tuesday are our Parent Teacher Conferences and we so look forward to chatting about your Ladybugs with you. On Thursday, we have our Leprechaun Day. We look forward to another fun week!

Crickets
On Monday, our Cricket class welcomed a new friend, Dominic! Dom has been in our Honeybee class this year and the staff and Dom’s family thought that the Cricket class might be a better fit for all. The teachers are so impressed by how fast these Gardeners make friends!

We read a fun story to continue our “Little Red Hen” unit, “Farmer Duck”, about a farmer who stayed in bed eating chocolates and expected the duck to do all his chores. The other animals on the farm had enough of that behavior and banished the farmer from the farm and the story ends with all the animals working together to do all the chores together. We talked about the similarities and differences between this story and The Little Red Hen. We finished reading our stamper books about The Little Red Hen, and we acted out the story of Little Red Hen with our puppet friends.

The Cricket kiddos love working with puppets and we had a great circle, learning how to stand in a power stance, with our feet spaced hip distance apart, hands on our hips and a hand out in front of us, using a big and powerful voice, saying “STOP!” I don’t like that!” If our friend does not listen, we either yell, “OW!” or we walk away and tell a grown up that we trust.

We made our Leprechaun Day invitations.

Speaking of doing chores, we started having jobs assigned to our Cricket Comrades, such as sweeping, table wiping, chalkboard cleaning, etc, and the kids seemed to really enjoy working with their weekly partner on a task together.

We worked on our March calendars and started our final projects for our Spring Art Show in April. Keep an eye on the courtyard for some adorable Leprechaun art popping up in the next few days.

Honeybees
Monday was such a fun day. The kids had loads of time on the playground, and when we came into the classroom, we started to hear the reports on favorite pet/favorite stuffy.

How fun to hear about their loved snuggle friends. We hope you enjoy watching the recordings of their reports.

We worked on our March calendars and we finished our “group plan” writings about what we plan to do with our hivemates.

We found out early in the week that our sweet friend, Mason, was moving back to South Carolina with his family, and we are missing him already! We celebrated Mason’s birthday on Thursday and sent him off with a fond farewell. We appreciate all that Mason’s family has done for our community, Taylor has been awesome helping us with our auction software, and Mason’s Didi and Dad have been amazing supporters of our program. We love you, Mason, and hope that you visit us whenever you happen to be in town.