Spring is in the Air!

Hello family and friends!

We've had a great week wrapping up our exploration of plants! This week we were able to see the results of our plant experiments. All of our lettuce and white flowers changed colors as they sat in color dyed water. Also, our sunflower seeds in the windows have started sprouting like crazy! We've been able to see the process from seed to plant as we watched small sprouts burst out of the seeds and roots begin to form. We also hung our bird feeders outside of our window to watch for birds. We haven't see any yet but we're still hopeful that some will come around!

To start off our week, we spent some time outside looking for signs of spring. As we've talked about plants, we've also been discussing the season of spring and what it looks like. We went on a nature scavenger hunt one morning. Everyone took a clipboard and pencil outside with them with a list of things to find. We spent time talking about the sights, sounds, and smells of spring time. As we found objects we checked them off of our list and put some findings in a baggy. We put all of our spring findings, along with magnifying glasses, in the science center to further explore them. At the end of the week we went back outside to do some nature drawings. We drew pictures of what we saw and heard. We noticed that we could hear a lot of spring sounds when we took time to listen! We labeled our spring drawings and have hung them up in the hallway if you'd like to check them out.

We also did some more planting this week! Our sunflower seeds in the windows were getting so big that we decided it would be best to take them down and actually plant them in cups. Each child has a cup with their name on it that they filled with soil and planted the sprouting seeds in. We have also been watering them throughout the week and making sure they get plenty of sunlight. Our hope is that these seeds will continue to grow and maybe some of you can transplant it into the ground and have a sunflower at home! We learned about the life cycle of a sunflower throughout our time watching them grow. We learned that once they die and dry up, more sunflower seeds will fall out of the flower. These new seeds will fall onto the ground and the process from seed to sunflower will start all over again.

In celebration of Earth Day, we also spent some time talking about recycling and it's importance. We talked about the different items that can be recycled as well as what they can be turned into. We learned that the more things we recycle, the less trash we add to the Earth and the healthier our Earth will become. We mentioned that there are a lot of different ways to recycle. One way of recycling is to make compost. We learned that we can recycle our fruit and vegetable skins as well as paper towels instead of just throwing them away. We learned all about the process of these materials breaking down (sometimes with the help of worms), turning into soil. As we talked about this we discussed the valuable nutrients that can come from our compost to help our plants grow. We have started saving our fruit and vegetable skins in a bucket and we'll be adding to it through the rest of the year. We're hoping to see some changes in our left overs as they begin to transform into nutrient rich soil for planting in the future!

As we've been studying plants this week, the kids have learned a lot of new words and concepts. Here are just a few new ideas that we've learned throughout our study...

dew drops: "They're rain drops that are on leaves but called dew drops." - John Walter
recycle: "Taking something old and turning it into something new!" - Max
compost: "Changing our trash into soil." - Asa
roots: "When you pour water it goes up the roots and through the plant." - Zeke
seeds: "You plant it, you watch it, and it grows bigger and bigger and bigger into a plant." - Kifer
bulb: "A brown round thing that grows a plant. It's pretty weird!" - Ashton
sprout: "When you plant the flower it starts as a little sprout." - David
bloom: "It's when a flower opens up." - Finn
soil: "It's the dirt with nutrients to help the flowers grow." - John Adam

Approaches to Learning:

Show creativity and imagination using materials in representational play.
Demonstrate increasing ability to identify and take appropriate risks in order to learn and demonstrate new skills.
Show curiosity in an increasing variety of activities, tasks, and learning centers.
Demonstrate eagerness and interest as a learner by questioning and adding ideas.

Social & Emotional:

Demonstrate self direction by making choices among peers, activities and materials.
Stands up for rights most of the time.
Responds respectfully to positive and negative feedback from adults most of the time.
Use classroom materials responsibly, most of the time.
Manage transitions positivity when told what to expect.

Language & Literacy:

Show interest in informational texts about familiar objects.
Make relevant comments or appropriate responses to story events or characters.
Begin to identify significant words from text read aloud.
Relate information from texts to personal experiences.
Incorporate information from informational texts into play activities.
Display curiosity and interest in learning new words.

Mathematics:

Investigate solutions to simple problems.
Classify objects in their environment by color, shapes, size or function.
Integrate mathematical ideas into personal representations.
Compare sets of no more than ten objects using the terms "more than" or "same as".
Represent simple joining and separating situations through 4.
Organize and represent data with real objects.

Collecting objects from our nature scavenger hunt...