We have been having a great time in the Lavender Room this April. As good citizens of our planet, we have been preparing for Earth Day. In preparation, we have been talking about what it is, about people who love nature (e.g. John Muir and Henry David Thoreau), backyard ecology, water, trash and recycling, gardening and zoology. We have taken a look at what happens in a yard that is allowed to grow wild and we wrote a song about dandelions called, “You’d Never Guess.” We looked at the relationship between water and geography and how different people get water and store water around the world. In extended day, we started our recycled sculptures for the June First Thursday art exhibit that we have been invited to participate in. We have been studying zoology: the vertebrates and invertebrates, predators and prey and the relationship between animals’ bodies, their defenses and their environments. We have been working with the life cycles of an amphibian (with our focus on frogs) and the life cycles of insects (e.g. butterflies). We learned “The Caterpillar Song,” and a poem about frogs called, “April: The Frog Moon.” To tie it all together, we learned some songs called “Earth Day,” “This Pretty Planet,” and have been singing our lunch song, “The Earth Is Good to Me” exchanging the lyric “..and the apple seed” for various other kinds of seeds of the children’s choosing. We also learned “The Gardening Song (“Inch by Inch”) and started a variety of different greens and herbs for our outdoor extension garden in the courtyard—they are growing beautifully by the way.
Conferences were delightful. We are looking forward to receiving photos of your family and pets for an upcoming project. I would like to encourage families to consider participating in TV Turn Off Week April 21-April 27. I will be passing along information about this national event in your files. I hope to see you at our up-coming parent night when we will be discussing Discipline and Redirection, April 25 at 6:30.
Take Care,
Emily Westberg