News from the Outdoors:

With a week of warm Spring weather in the forecast the Nature Detectives made the most of their outside time this week. The Nature Detectives were greeted on the playground by hundreds of tent caterpillars! All week long the kids had fun watching, holding, petting, and making homes for the caterpillars. 

On Monday we talked about how bees and butterflies help spread pollen around which helps plants grow, then we played a pollination relay-game where the kids pretended to be butterflies or bees and collect pollen and spread it to other flowers and plants.

After playing the pollination game, we went on a short hike. While hiking the AM class crossed paths with a small garden snake! The PM class hiked towards the pond to look for a box turtle that had been sighted there earlier in the day…though no turtle was spotted, they did see lots of frogs!

On Tuesday we started to talk about how plants grow and played some fun gross-motor skill games while we pretended to plants some seeds, water them, give them sunlight and finally grow into trees!

On Wednesday, the AM class took a hike to the Lookout to roll logs and collect bugs. After collecting a large variety of bugs, they brought them back to the school to display in their Bug Museum on the playground. The PM class had a fun hike with Ms. Susan, where they began to learn about birds! They took a hike up to the bird feeders to spy some birds, then flew down the meadow, pretending to be their favorite birds!

To cap off the week, the Nature Detectives had an all-outdoors-day! They spent some time in the outdoors classroom turning over the raised garden beds, then hiked up to the compost bins to collect some compost to help enrich the soil! They also got to visit the Children’s Garden and the Blair Native Plant Garden to look at the flowers and plants growing there.

News from the Classroom:

The Nature Detectives kicked off their week by creating a new page for their journals. They talked about what they would do if they were an insect and created some fun buggy art! In the class room they also got to create colorful flower gardens out of blocks and tanagram pieces. They also discovered  bug masks and flowers in the dramatic play area and spent some time buzzing around the classroom helping flowers grow!

Continuing with our seed theme, the discovery table was packed full of different types of seeds, and illustrations of the plants they grow into. The kids enjoyed learning about how seeds come in all kinds of different shapes and sizes and can grow into some many different kinds of plants!

The Nature Detectives also put their cooking skills to work as they measured, mixed and kneaded up new batches of play dough. Once complete, they made bugs out of the play dough with bug parts!

In the art department, the Nature Detectives put their skills to work as they created new self-portraits! Since this is the second time we’ve done self-portraits this year, we talked about how much they’ve grown since last time, and then wrote about what new skills they have learned since the beginning of the school year. The AM class also worked on a very special “Gyton is a Big Brother…Again!” book as Gyton and his family welcomed baby Audrey to their family! Congrats Gyton!

Weekly Top Hits:

Inch by Inch

Inch by Inch, row by row

Gonna make this garden grow

All I need is a rake and hoe and a piece of fertile ground

Inch by Inch, row by row

Someone bless these seeds I sow

Someone warm them from below

Til the rain comes tumblin’ down

Books We Read:

Planting the Wild Garden by Kathryn Galbraith

Oh Say Can you Seed? by Bonnie Worth

The Curious Garden by Peter Brown

Inch by Inch by David Mallett

Spoiler Alert:

Birds!