This Week in Review - March 18 - 22

                           This information is also found in Walter's weekly email:

We had an incredibly busy and fun week before Spring Break – so many special activities to keep the children’s bodies active and their brains’ engaged. I think we are all ready for a nice, relaxing week to recover.

Perhaps our biggest treat of the week was Flea Market Math. This is always a hugely anticipated event as children have spent days sorting, pricing, and “window shopping.” Finally, on Thursday, we got to spend a dollar at the market. Children went home with many treasures, and learned a lot of math in the preceding weeks. This was a very meaningful culminating project as it is real-life and hands-on. The best learning usually is! Now we will pool the money and will vote on a special treat to spend it on.

 

Projects with Grace’s class are always really wonderful – I think we all love and appreciate our time together. It’s fun to be in a larger group, sometimes, and with children we don’t always get to work and play with. This week’s project time included making mindful jars on Monday (these were a big hit to make, and continue to bring comfort during busy or stressful times) and reading about Persephone and Demeter on Thursday as a way to greet the official start of Spring. We even got to taste pomegranate seeds – although poor Persephone paid dearly for eating just six.

Another way to greet spring is to do some good old fashioned spring cleaning – we did this also on Thursday. We mixed up a batch of eco-friendly cleaning solutions, donned our hand-decorated aprons, and using recycled rags, got busy! This was our Environmental Super Hero Project for the month of March.

Science with Shan was all about stars and stations. Children were thrilled to rotate through four different constellation stations. They made mini constellation scopes, recreated constellations using rubber bands on a huge geoboard, made different ones using mini marshmallows and toothpicks, and finally made star life cycle “cootie catchers.”

We finished Mrs. Piggle Wiggle’s Magic and it was such a big hit that we went right into another Mrs. Piggle Wiggle book. We also worked some more on our myths – we will be adding illustrations soon. Library time with Beck continues to bring us a lot of joy – she is just a delight! We are so lucky to have her. We have a new pet baby dragon for the library, too, which we have named “Emerald.”