Happy May

May is off to a wonderful start!
Our focus has been on Spring, Seeds, and Manners and we have tied our stories into a variety of activities.
Books we have read include:
The Carrot Seed by Ruth Krauss
I'm a Seed by Jean Marzollo
Muncha Muncha Muncha by Candace Fleming
Carrot Soup by John Segal
Mrs. Rose's Garden by Elaine Greenstein
A Fruit is a Suitcase for Seeds by Jean Richards
And the Good Brown Earth by Kathy Henderson
Jody's Beans by Malachy Doyle
One Watermelon Seed by Celia Barker Lottridge

These stories have been so fun to read and fill our days with wonder, inspiration, and many possibilities to make related connections.
There is a recipe for carrot soup that we will be making, we have been planting seeds and watching them sprout, sorting, classifying, and counting seeds, matching seeds to their fruits and vegetables, cutting open lots of fruits and vegetables to observe the seeds with a magnifier, talking about gardens, finding pictures in magazines of gardens, plants, flowers, vegetables, etc.

Drawing lines and designs in cornmeal has been a captivating sensory experience for the children as they will spend quiet focused time tracing through the cornmeal with sticks, fingers, scoopers, cups, measuring spoons, and little cars, rocks, stones, and shells. This is a great pre-writing skill and also a very calming activity as well.

Our roads have become more extensive with chalk drawings illustrating towns, houses, driveways, parks, rivers, and community places, such as stores and smoothie bars. We have even included plots of land for planned gardens with the children making suggestions for the types of plants they wish to start.