April 25th, 2018

​April has flown by! The children have been working so hard. I feel like each day flies by in a buzz of activity. The children are eager for new lessons, repeating lessons given and enjoying working with friends. It’s just as it should be as we near the end of the year.

There has been lots of talk and observations of flowers, seeds, insects, birds and everything else related to spring. One afternoon I took the children to collect one of the numerous black swallowtail caterpillars that were enjoying our fennel plant. We brought it to the classroom, with an abundance of fennel, and marveled at how much it ate!  After about a week, it anchored itself to the top of our bug box. We went outside at 2:15 and it still looked like a caterpillar. I came in at 2:45 and it was a chrysalis! Amazing how quickly it can change. You can see the black ball that was its skin hanging on the chrysalis. Now we are constantly checking for the green chrysalis to change color and darken, indicating the butterfly is ready to come out!  Very exciting to see! It’s fun to hear the stories the children have of caterpillars they have at home and the excitement they show in telling their friends what they have seen. Riley even brought the empty chrysalises she had from home to share for show and tell.

The bulbs we planted in our garden are beginning to bloom. Our sweet peas the children planted with Ms. Guitana are growing nicely.The pots and plants the children painted and planted certainly brighten up our view from the classroom! I hope some of the bean plants the children took home are surviving!  Those literally sprouted up overnight! It was great to see how a dried up looking bean could sprout and grow with a little soil, water and sun. We had three that did not sprout, for whatever reason. I will try to get those children to try again so they can bring their's home too.

We welcomed a new child at the beginning or April.  Olmo Petrogalli and his family just moved from the UK. He has been a wonderful addition and has fit right in with the class. We all love his accent!

If you have not had time to sign up for an observation, we still have a couple of weeks to do that. I will probably close the class for observations the last week or two of May.  The excitement seems to escalate as summer approaches. The younger ones still come in and just work, but the older ones know what’s coming and raise the level of energy in the classroom considerably.