Dirt, water, sand, and FUN!

These sweet babes just steal my heart!! 

Look at that joy on his little face because he found, "Da' mos' pweddy fwower, Ms. Donna!" 

Swooonnnn.......

I LOVE living in preschool world.  Sure...we can corner the market on tantrums, but days like THIS make up for the challenging moments a thousand times over. 

This month is all about flowers and soil and growing gardens!  We will discuss the roots, leaves, worms, and dirt and EVERYTHING it takes to make a flower grow from seed to maturity.

But first a little prep work...

It took time and patience and TOOLS to prep this soil for our garden this year.  It was hard and dry.  It was unforgiving as we scraped, hammered, and dug our way in.  It did not want to relent in the late spring heat.  We had little rain and just the tiniest bit of water made mud fast which was fun for play but not to great for actually prepping the soil!  

We learned words what a rake, hoe, and shovel were.  We added a trowel and pitch fork to the mix.  We beat it, and raked it, and finally it softened enough to mix the fertilizer in and give it a good long drink before adding our seeds and plants.

Next we learned that parts of a plant so we could properly care for it.

Roots, stem, leaves, flowers! This is how we grow!!  We learned the parts of a plant and what each part does.  We also discussed that each part of the plant has its own job to do and that the plant cannot grow or even survive without all its parts working together toward the same goal, growth!  It is the same thing with a school or a family or a friendship.

It takes everyone working together toward the same goals so it can grow.  We are all different, but together we make an amazing team!

We built some flowers with all its parts using yarn, pipe cleaners, construction paper, and tissue papers

As we laid all the resources out on the tables we held up each piece and asked, "What plant part does this look like?"  They would answer "roots' or 'stem" as they carefully chose and placed the parts on their own papers with a bit of heavy glue!! Our education partners at Mother Goose Time provided a "harvest" (pun intended) of games, crafts, science, math, language arts, and sensory for us to "dig" into all month long and this sweet "Plant Parts" project was just one craft from the above "Plant Parts" lesson plan.

Each "plant" turned out uniquely beautiful and it helped them to better understand plants parts to have some hands-on creative arts moments to determine placement and size.

We added the letter "f" for "flower" and we named it's upper and lowercase partners.  We counted leaves and stems of our flowers and we took a walk to the "f" farm to pick some "f" flowers to give little learners some sun, scents, and sensations all around the fields of the farm.

Picking flowers, prepping the soil, taking long walks in the fields and the farms is all part of our days in May at Woolsey Academy for Young Learners!

As always we wish you well and we hope you get to play today.

​-L