Highlights From Our First Week of School

WOW! What an amazing week of curiosity, wonder, excitement and fun! I had the pleasure of meeting 18 children who put a smile on my face each and every day! We survived heat temperatures that climbed close to 40 degrees and we still managed to be kind to one another!

Our week was filled with endless possibilities to explore and learn about! Our first day of school began with students bringing in a soil sample from anywhere their summer vacation took them! Soil samples were collected from the beach, a garden, student's backyard, and the forest! We used magnifying glasses to take a closer look and of course, this meant that we needed to plant something! I had a variety of seeds for children to choose from; apple, lemon, orange, broccoli, sunflowers and thyme. Students either chose to plant using their soil sample, my potting soil or a combination of both!

Our second day of school, we hosted our first guest, Mr. Pallett! He is a Millwright and he volunteered his time to come into our classroom and help students build a greenhouse to create the best conditions for growing our plants!

Our third day of school, involved all of us going out on the playground to participate in an "insect hunt"! Each student was given a butterfly net to comb the grassy areas to observe living creatures and then set them free. We saw a beetle, a moth, a white butterfly, lots of grasshoppers, a dragonfly with a broken wing, a caterpillar, milkweed plants and a sunflower. The excitement was contagious as students called each other over to see what they had found! Next, we made Nature Journals from brown paper bags and students were asked to draw, label and print one sentence about each of their findings. The day ended with a letter arriving from Mother Nature challenging us to be a "naturalist" and a "botanist" to help protect nature and all of its living things. Of course, we agreed and together we cheered, "1, 2, 3 Mother Nature!"

We ended our first week of school with another letter from Mother Nature and two Butterfly Terrariums! The chatter, excitement and curiosity of what was inside the mesh screen filled my day with smile after smile! We soon discovered there were 4 monarch caterpillars in one terrarium and 5 monarch caterpillars in the other terrarium. Our job is to help Mother Nature raise these butterflies so there is an increased population of monarch butterflies. If we aren't careful, monarch butterflies just might become extinct! Oh no!