The Detective Post #11

The Nature Detectives finished off our fairies and gnomes unit with celebrations of love and rainbows! With our icy grounds turning to puddles, we also continued our exploration on water flow and what that looks like here at Woodend!

While the past two weeks were spent thinking about ways to be kind to ourselves and others, this week the students shifted their focus to kindness ideas for the earth around us! We embarked on a three day art project to spread our love of the earth to anyone who comes to visit Woodend! First, the students picked up rocks from our creek beds to bring back to the classroom. We then proceeded to paint our rocks, and write kind wishes for the earth on the bottom of each as a special surprise! Once they dried, each child got the chance to hide their kindness rock on the trails of Audubon, to spread our wishes of a clean earth to anyone who visits!

The rain and warmer weather furthered our interest in water and its many properties! The AM class enjoyed a hike to the compost stations and rain garden, where we learned about water conservation right here at Audubon! The PM class enjoyed a visit from Ms. Gail, who talked with us about the importance of clean water and took us to the pond to investigate!

On Wednesday we have a kindness and love party to celebrate all the things we have learned throughout our fairies and gnomes unit! The children worked together to create a “love potion,” (yogurt and strawberry smoothie) as well as edible toadstools out of apples and bananas! The students also had the chance to write love notes with the help of parent volunteers.

The PM class also enjoyed creating sparkly glitter magnets this week, while the AM class got a special outdoor painting project from Ann-Mari!

We continued our fairy fun indoors this week, by creating fairy dough out of hair conditioner and corn starch, adding toadstool and stump tunnels to our trains, and introducing a new fairy board game!

To finish out our lessons we learned about something magical that water can create- rainbows! The students experimented with water to try to create our own rainbows, as well as created recycled rainbows to hang in our classroom. In true fairy and gnome style, the PM class had quite the surprise! While getting ready for our closing circle at the end of the day, we spied a real rainbow in the sky above us- it was incredible! The students sang our newly learned Rainbows in my Bubbles song and danced under its colors! It was truly an amazing send off to round out our fairy and gnome fun at Audubon.