Here we are at the end of May! Hard to believe that there are only a few sessions left in each class! 

With the year winding down, (Rapidly!), we are trying to make sure that we have all of our I’s dotted and our T’s crossed, before we close up the classroom and open up our summer camp sessions! 

We will be putting our Lost and Found items out on a table in the courtyard for the next few sessions. Please peruse them and make sure you collect lost mittens, gloves, water bottles and jackets. Anything that is not claimed will be washed and donated. 

As a reminder, if you are interested in checking out the Lending Library one more time, we would be so happy to see the books go home with someone who is excited to read them. Any books left over the summer will also be donated, and we will start fresh again in the fall. 

These final few sessions will be spent finishing off our Fathers’ day gifts, making our ‘next year’s’ mascot necklaces, reviewing our year of what we have learned, and just enjoying the children. They are above all, the best part of our job. We are astounded every year at the growth and development in our students, and, we are surprisingly surprised, every single year, about the same occurrences, Ladybugs get louder, pair off with best friends, Crickets move from a best friend to a group of friends, lots of tattling as they want to impress us with their knowledge of the rules of their school, and they easily write their own name without a yellow brick road. The Honeybees are trying to enjoy every last minute at their beloved school, lingering longer with their Belleamie hugs, and wanting to arrive earlier each day to have more courtyard time with their besties. Parents, too, seem to be arriving earlier for pick up, to spend more time with the other parents in the Gazebo, and want to linger longer, feeding the chickens, or moving up the street to Squak Valley Park Playground. 

It’s a special moment in time and brings about all sorts of emotions every year. Take it all in, and remain mindful. It’s going to be ‘the good old days’ in a minute or two! 

Ladybugs

We had such a fun week in the Ladybug class. Kali, our Gibson Ek intern, just said out of the blue, “Wow! These kiddos are really Crickets now, aren’t they?” They are loud, they are active, they have made friends and are jumping all over the place! This year, we thought it would be fun to try a Cricket activity in the last few weeks of Ladybug class. We had the kids make some ‘stamper books’. We give each student a booklet with 4 or 5 blank pages inside. The children use a variety of rubber stamps that are out on the table to ‘stamp a story’. The teacher will ask them what is happening on each page, and write down their words. After they have told us about each page, we ask the student what a good name for the story would be. At circle time, the teacher will read the story to the class and the author will sit beside the teacher in the author chair. We hope you read these stories to your child, and then invite them to ‘read’ them to you. Remember, it is THEIR story, so the words might be different each time. That’s okay! They are continuing to author their stories. This is such a great next step for the Bugs for their literacy journey. The Peek a Boo books teach them to hold the book upright, turn a page for each phrase, and the fun phrase on the last page, “THE END”. The stamper books continue the journey, learning about what an ‘author’ is, illustrating their own stories, and thinking about their own plotlines and titles. The kiddos are all at their own different levels. Some might still be at the labelling stage, where they just report or name what is on the page. Others can tell a sentence about each page, and some have already gotten to the place where they can keep the story continuously going from page to page. It’s a really fun activity and we are really glad that we decided to try it out on our Ladybugs this year! 

We hope you enjoyed the little photo/news page from our friend Sean, in China! We are working on recording the children singing at circle and sending a video message to Sean. He so loves all the songs and games that we play at circle. 

Thursday was our sweet Kali’s last day with us this school year. We sure do appreciate all that she has learned, and all that she has done to help us this year. The students just adore her and she feels the same way about them. Thanks Kali for everything! 

Crickets

We had a short week this past week, but we sure got a lot accomplished! 

Just as the Ladybugs tried their hand at their first “Stamper Books’, the Crickets have been trying their first reports! About half of the Crickets have completed their “All About Me” reports, and we hope to get the rest done next week. It is so fun to see them stand in front of their friends and peers and use a pointer to help  us see what they really wanted to include on their posters. 

We’ve never done this exercise in the Cricket class before, and we are all learning from the exercise! 

1. We’ve learned that the kids, even the shy ones, will get up and share information about themselves, and take such pride in their poster. 
2. We’ve learned that Question vs. Feedback is a difficult concept for a 4 year old to grasp. For teachers, almost as much joy is realized when WE learn a concept, as when a student grasps a concept. We changed this prompt halfway through the week to ask for “Questions or Comments”, and after each response, we reply with “Great Question” or “Great Comment”. Thank you Crickets for being such great teachers!
3. As this is our first time trying reports with 4 year olds, you will hear the teachers guiding the students throughout their presentations on the videos. The teachers are encouraging the kids to ‘use a big voice, so everyone can hear’, ‘use your classmate’s name when calling on them’, ‘say ‘thank you’ after someone compliments you.’ etc. We hope you understand that we are not ‘hounding’ the kids, but guiding them in a brand new skill. 
4. We love to hear the kids’ interest and excitement in their peers’ posters, and also in the opportunity to do it themselves. We’ve heard several students say repeatedly, “When is it my turn?” When we respond that we haven’t seen their poster yet, they say, ‘Oh yeah, I’m still working on it” :0)
5. We are so proud of these Crickets for doing what they are doing! Can you believe they have been on the earth for 4 short years, and they are standing in front of a group with a pointer and telling us ‘All about themselves!’ ?!

The Crickets at this time every year, are developing into Honeybees! They are branching out from just having one best friend to having a group of friends. They are finding it easier to move from playmate to playmate if their ‘plus one’ is absent. They are also wanting so hard to impress the teachers with their good behavior and their knowledge of the school rules. Thus…tattling. It starts out as ‘informing us of someone who is hurt’, and when we look down the playground we see the ‘hurt’ child running and laughing. It graduates to letting us know that there are some hurt feelings of classmates because someone else said something mean, to again looking over and seeing that everyone is playing happily. We then hear about a lot of potty talk going on, or unfairness, but we are trying to impress upon the kids that we want the kids who are hurt, insulted, or feeling left out, to be able to tell us themselves. Afterall, we want the kiddos to be able to advocate for themselves. Of course, we also want the students to advocate for others. It’s a fine line to walk! Something we are trying this year is, instead of tattling, that we want to hear ‘tootling’! ‘Tootling’ is reporting when you see someone do something good, friendly, or helpful. The person reporting gets lots of appreciation and recognition, and then the student that is ‘tootled’ on, also gets lots of appreciation and recognition. 

We’re trying it! We’ll let you know how it is going! 

Have a great weekend everyone! 

Honeybees

Wow! What another fun week we had with these Bees! We celebrated Orion’s 6th trip around the sun on Tuesday, and Parsley enjoyed making a rare 6 candle crown for him. We learned a lot about Bees this week, the guard bees, the nurse bees, the worker bees and the Queen Bee! 

Next week, our attention turns to Tall tales, Cowboy stories and cowpoke names as we prepare for our wonderful Honeybee Roundup at the Okie Dokie Corral. You might want to chat around the dinner table about a good cowpoke name for your Honeybee. We often try to guide them to use a phrase from the old west that starts with the same letter as their first name, like “Howlin’ Hank” or “Rattlesnake Riley”. We will be collecting their cowboy names at circle early next week to help us in our planning for Thursday evening. It might be a fun project to ask Claude or ChatGPT as a family! 

Thursday evening, the kids will rest up Thursday afternoon and not come to school until 3:30. We will have a few photo shoot opportunities in the courtyard, and after saying goodbye to their parents, we embark on a scavenger hunt throughout the campus, up into the forest and winding up in the creek. When we arrive back to the playground, we will sit down to a delicious meal (kids will vote on their meal choices before Thursday) and then a romping good time on the playground, where the bonfire will be roaring to make some ‘smores! Every year, we love to see how this truly ‘bonds’ this group of children to be a real ‘Honeybee Team’ as they prepare for graduation. The play on the playground the final week of school just seems a little sweeter as there is no good guy/bad guy or super heroes/zombies etc., but just one big happy Honeybee group. We love to experience this memory making evening every year. 

If you haven’t done so yet, please RSVP on the graduation page so that we know how many chairs we need for the ceremony. In advance, could you please also let us know if you have folding chairs that we might borrow if necessary? The staff can usually come up with 50 or so, but it is good to know if we need more. We have heard that the plan is to have a couple of ‘babysitters’ on the playground for younger siblings. This is awesome. We hold the ‘audience’ open only to adults and older siblings that can be in control so that all of your focus is reserved for your graduate in this special moment in time. 

Thanks everyone! It’s an exciting moment in time for everyone, we understand. Have a great weekend.