“Eewy gluey,” Orchards, Ice cream, Ants, Plants, Pink lagoons and Peace!

Dear Families,

We began the week looking at our nature basket filled with treasures from our walks.  Something had happened over the weekend! “It’s all crunchy!” “The mint is crumbly.  Smell the mint!” Beck noticed that when he picked up some of the flowers with fluffy gray heads, lots of tiny  seeds floated down.  We spread contact paper on the table and the children chose items from the basket to arrange on the clear, sticky background.  “It’s gluey!” “It’s eewy and gluey!” When the children were done we spread another piece of clear paper over the top, capturing our work in a transparent “nature window.”

“I can see the shapes!  It’s a feather.”  “The penny is stuck!”

Children looked up from lunch to comment on the beautiful art they had created together, “I see the twigs.” “I can see through that.” “I want to carry the basket.” 

All around the room, there is a growing collection of our work as a class – symbols of the time we’ve spent together and what we’ve been thinking about. Above our in-class cubbies you may have noticed collages with red tissue paper apples.  These are illustrations for our song about Farmer Brown’s apples.  Each child approached the task differently, choosing to connect branches, trunk, leaves and apples in unique ways.  Neal noticed paper that the leaves had been cut from and became very interested in trying to fill the negative space with the correctly shaped leaf.  “It will be grass,” he said. “It’s under the tree in the orchard.”  “What’s an orchard?” “It’s a kind of thing where engines pick up apples and they’re delivered to the village.”

“I put all my glue on the rest so it could stick down.”

The children feel much empathy for Farmer Brown, and often say when the song is ended and all his apples have been eaten, “Let’s give him some ice-cream!”  “Don’t be sad.”  “We can plant more seeds.”   This desire leads us into another song we sing about ice cream, “I want a bowl of ice cream, I want to put some (fill in the blank!) on it.  I want a bowl of ice cream, mmm and a little bit more!” Children raise their hands to have a turn suggesting a line of the song.  We’ve had ice cream with sprinkles, rainbow sprinkles, gummi worms, gummi bears, chocolate chips, chocolate sauce, spaghetti, pickles and mac and cheese! Reese, Stella and Zora went to the board one day to draw what kind of ice cream and topping they liked best and ‘read’ to each other what they had drawn or ‘written.’

We have been telling stories to each other using other symbolic languages as well.  The Three Billy Goats Gruff  is a story the children have listened to with only a voice and guitar as accompaniment.  They have requested it again and again and we began to use things from our block corner to help bring the tale alive.  One day some of the children helped to enact the story using small, medium and large blocks for the goats, a large’x’ shaped block for the troll and an arched block for the bridge.  Someone suggested using a blue silk scarf for water and a green silk scarf for grass to cover the mountainside, also known as Stella’s lap!