Working Together

Teacher Can and I have been observing some wonderful things in our little Escuelita community. Acts of kindness, friendship, service, and leadership are portrayed by in big and little ways by our students. We see simple gestures of kindness such as offering a hug to a another student who is crying, or a tissue to a friend with a runny nose. We see students working together to solve problems by taking turns and offering suggestions, and working side by side to create art or a garden project-all the while sharing materials and space. Students offer help when it's time to clean up and pick up toys, wash tables and materials. We see students welcome new friends to the classroom and invite them to play.  It's truly a joy to watch the children not only demonstrate our community values, but build the community themselves! 

Thank you to the entire community for contributing to our Vertical Recycle Garden. The garden is beautiful and full of life. We received so many items for the garden from friends and families.

Our Escuelita class is continuing to dig & plant. The garden will be an on going project throughout the year.

  

This week we also started our class seed bank. We took out many seeds from a pumpkin. Next we cleaned the seeds. Lastly we dried the seeds in the sun. 

 

The Glory of Gardening

Hands in the dirt, 

head in the sun,

heart with nature.

To nature a garden is to feed

not just the body, but the soul.

-A. Austin

Planting a Rainbow

All things in the garden is the current trend in Escuelita! We've been reading Planting a Rainbow by Lois Ehlert and discovering a rainbow of colors, shapes textures, and scents! Exploring flowers through art has left our classroom with so much bright and cheerful artwork.

We look at flowers and draw or paint what we see, noticing the stems, leaves, petals, and roots.

We feel flowers and create similar texture through tissue paper collage.

We bury seeds and flowers in our play dough gardens.

 

And build flower shapes and parts with blocks and found objects, too! I see stems, leaves, petals and roots, do you? 

This week in Science we continued to talk about seeds. We investigated seeds from sunflowers and pomegranates.

We planted our first tulip bulbs! 

We counted seeds. We measured seeds. We used tweezers to pick out the seeds. We compared the seeds. We looked at the seeds through our magnifying glasses. We made seeds with clay. We tasted the seeds and we even painted with the pomegranate seeds.

We also continued to talk about the parts of the flower. The seed, the roots, the stem, the pistil, and the petals.

Our Tiny Seedlings are Growing...

 

Tiny seedling are growing right before our eyes. We have planted peas, poppies, chard, brussels sprouts, spinach, lettuce, carrots and radishes in our class garden. We have been constructing our own guesses (hypothesis), formulating our own ideas, asking so many questions, and observing things that include flowers, dirt, soil, leaves, rain water, seeds, plants, sand, rocks and mud. 

  

We are becoming familiar with most of the tools that we have in our science classroom. We have been measuring with rulers and tape measures. We've been looking at things through our magnifying glasses. We've tested the weight of different rocks with our class scale. We protect our eyes with our science goggles and we've sorted seeds with lab tweezers! 

 

Our students are curious about the world around them. Students have explored and collected so many items that they have found in nature. We've come across worms in the mud, bees on flowers, dragonflies in the sky, snails in the rain, mantis's in the grass and ladybugs in our garden.