News From the Outdoors:

The Nature Detectives dove into another week of Planetpals by meeting Breezy, a Planetpal that represents wind and fresh air. For our hike we headed to the Stumps and played The Big Wind Blows, a game of making connections and best of all, running around.

 

On Tuesday, we had to get into full rain gear for our outside portion of the day. We walked up to the Amphitheater to check out the flying squirrel feeder, and roll some logs. On the way there some of the kids picked up new copies of the Naturalist Quarterly, which has a map of Woodend on the cover and the kids had fun locating where some of their favorite spots are on the map! While hiking in the afternoon, some of the PM kids spotted the elusive fox that has been seen hanging around Woodend!

 

Heavy rains again on Wednesday made for some fun river/water pipe creation on the playground and some soggy hikes around the grounds. The week of fun in the outdoors was capped off on Thursday by heading up to the Rain Garden where recently, lots of construction has been happening. A landscaping crew was there to do some planting and the Nature Detectives got to pitch in and help by planting some Golden Ragwort and Rush!

 

News From the Classroom:

With this being our final week of Planetpals, it was a busy week in the classroom as well. The kids made kites to play with in the breeze with Breezy, used puff balls to make craters on the moon for Moonbeam, played Planetpal Bingo after meeting Starbaby (as named by the AM class)/Starbright (as named by the PM class). Starbaby/Starbright also taught us that our other Planetpal, Sunnyray is ALSO a star, just much closer to us, so it looks bigger than the other stars we see in the night sky.  Lastly, we met Recycle Girl on Friday and talked about all the different ways we can reduce, reuse and recycle at school and at home.

 

The Nature Detectives also added another page to their journals when they wrote about different ways in which they themselves are Planetpals and help the earth. To cap off the Planetpal unit, each class made a Planetpal class book filled with pictures of their favorite Planetpals, and/or created their own new Planetpals!

 

The AM class was happy to see Ann-Mari return from her travels abroad when she joined the class on Thursday and shared a fun book with the class about the wind. Ms. Susan also brought a fun book about compost stew to share with the PM class. After reading that book we then took a hike up to the Audubon Compost bins to drop off the school’s compost and make some compost stew of our own! The PM class also created not one, but two birthday books this week!

 

Books we Read:

Gilberto and the Wind by Marie Hallets

Mooncake by Ashe

Not a Stick by Antoinette Portis

 

Weekly Top Hits:

I see the Moon:

I see the moon and the moon sees me

Under the shade of the old oak tree

please let the light that shines on me

shine on the ones I love

Over the mountains and under the sea

back where my heart is longing to be

please let the light that shines on me

shine on the ones I love

Twinkle Twinkle Little Star

 

Spoiler Alert!:

Next week we’ll start our camping unit!