March 2022: Hello Spring!
March is a breath of fresh air! A time to welcome a new season, new weather, and new life!
This month was full of exciting activities! We had a fair share of both warm and cold days, but played outside regardless. The children look forward to a new season and have been noticing the changing weather. We geared a lot of our exploration toward science experiments. The children used the scientific method to acquire knowledge.
We got lucky with a day of sunshine on our Spring Celebration! We were able to spend the day outside enjoying nature. Spring is a time to welcome new life to the world. Children get so excited to be part of this process. It is so rewarding to give care to another life form.
Mindfulness is practiced everyday at SimpleLife. After months of practicing the children are ready to dive deep into the meaningful practice of mindfulness. Many children have the natural ability to live fully in the present moment. Imagine if adults could engage in an activity without thinking about what they need to prepare for the future!
The children experienced multiple new art genres and completed their clay projects from February. Now that the weather is getting warmer we will be able to do more of our art projects outdoors!
Science Explorations:
“A scientist in his laboratory is not a mere technician: he is also a child confronting natural phenomena that impress him as though they were fairy tales.”
~Marie Curie
Earth science is a popular exploration because it has so many categories. We started the month introducing rocks and crystals at our discovery table. Miss Jenny has a large collection of stones and gems that the children investigated with care. They used magnifying glasses and flashlights to observe the similarities and differences. Growing our crystals was such an exciting experiment! Something about experiments… they don’t always work. Our sugar crystals did not grow as we had hoped. What a valuable learning experience for the children. It gave us an opportunity to evaluate the process and talk about what we would do differently next time.
Spring brings new weather and children can easily relate to the weather because they experience everyday! Jumping in puddles, running in the sprinklers on a hot day, to building a snowman - weather highly impacts children’s play. We started the month with the water cycle. We used movement to be the water falling from the sky, settling on the ground, then evaporating back to clouds. They made a visual diagram as well. Wind was a fun topic to explore. The children made wind socks, pinwheels, and experimented with a fan to make objects fly.
The 3 states of matter (solid, liquid, gas) comes with many fun activities. We added water to some clay and watched it as it dried. We used water and salt to melt objects out of ice cubes, and made homemade popsicles, yum!
Spring Celebration:
“The day you plant the seed is not the day you eat the fruit.”
~Fabienne Fredrickson
We get very excited about spring here at SimpleLife because it is home to multiple garden spaces! The children spent the day prepping our gardens, planting peas, and potting a bulb to take home to watch grow.
What types of things can you find in the spring? A bird? ladybug? flower? The children set about the school grounds in search of the many new things in nature that comes along with spring. Although we weren’t able to find everything on our list the children remembered and found some things days later. They excitedly said, “Teacher, I found a worm! Cross it off our scavenger hunt list!”
The highlight of our spring celebration, our pet picnic! Each child brought an animal stuffy to sit beside at our picnic. We enjoyed music in the sunshine with friends and yummy treats! What a special day we had together. There was so much love, sense of community, and excitement among the group.
Welcoming New Life:
Including children in the process of nurturing new life is magnificent. They get to experience patience, compassion, and responsibility.
We began the incubation of some fertile chicken eggs we got from a farm! This is so exciting! This exploration will be one of the highlights of April. Not only does this project teach children the life cycle of a chicken, but instills patience, responsibility, compassion, and teaches about loss. We hope that we don’t lose any, but it is a realistic possibility.
Spring is an important time because it is when we bring new life into our world. Planting seeds teaches the children about where a lot of our food comes from. If children don’t learn about agriculture, they may think that food only comes from the grocery store, but what happens before it goes to the store? The children were able to experience eating the fruits of our labor during harvest season, but now they get to be the hands in the dirt nurturing our Earth.
Mindfulness March:
Research in mindfulness has shown a broad span of benefits.
Mindfulness: what is it and why is it important?
“Mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us. Mindfulness is a quality that every human being already possesses, it’s not something you have to conjure up, you just have to learn how to access it.”
“When we’re mindful, we reduce stress, enhance performance, gain insight and awareness through observing our own mind, and increase our attention to others’ well-being ….. suspend judgment and unleash our natural curiosity about the workings of the mind, approaching our experience with warmth and kindness—to ourselves and others. “(https://www.mindful.org/what-is-mindfulness/)
We practice mindfulness daily at school. With the children, we have them focus on their breath, use their imagination, and take time to notice what their bodies and minds are doing and feeling. The children enjoy our yoga practice and have fun challenging themselves. They have many of our positive affirmations memorized with the corresponding yoga pose! This month we deep dived into mindfulness and incorporated it into our science and art explorations.
We taught the children the word “notice”. To notice something is to use one of your senses to better understand it. When we would use observation skills we would have the children say “I notice…”
We made mindfulness jars with the children, letting them pick their own colors of glitter and water to put in a reused jar. This is a tool the children can use when feeling overwhelmed. Swirling the glitter and watching it fall to the bottom allows us to pause and and focus on the now.
Music is also a part of our daily routine at school. In March, we brought out the musical instruments and let the children notice the different sounds and how it makes them feel.
“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” – Aldous Huxley
Art Exploration:
Introducing new genres of art allows the children to explore different types of expression and offer them autonomy over their artistic styles.
We started our cute pet rocks in February, but they didn’t get completed until March. This is a fun and simple craft that deepens imagination, lets them paint on a new material, and show them the unlimited opportunities art provides us.
It’s always a good time when glue is involved! We started 3D paintings. The children glued recyclable items onto a foam board that will later be painted and then made able to hang on the wall. This is an evolving art work that allows the children to follow their desires and change their plans as they come up with new ideas.
Spring means flowers! We set up a vase of colorful flowers and had the children create a still life piece. They started by drawing what they see with a marker, then adding the colors with water color paints. This project brings the true artistic skill out of each and every child. We get to see the world through their eyes, and how beautiful it is!
Painting becomes so much more exciting when you can do it at an easel! The power we can feel using a brush and our hands to blend the colors in an abstract and lovely way. This was a free choice art project where they chose when they wanted to do it, what they wanted to paint, and how many paintings they wanted to create. Teachers admire each one of these artist just as they are. Every child has skills to express themselves through at least one of the many genres and mediums in art. They teach us about joy and mindfulness everyday through their imagination and creativity.
