March: In like a lion out like a lamb...

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It has been a full and fun week! Many thanks to the Marshall family for their donation of flower bulbs this past fall. We have kept them cool and are now able to plant them in hopes of Spring.
The children are loving tending to their bulbs.

We introduced the month of March with lions and lambs, explaining the familiar saying and giving the leader of the day a choice between the two to stick on our classroom calendar.  Interestingly we have had the same number of "lion days" as "lamb days" so far. (see photo)

As our study about the world's continents continues we will begin learning about North America beginning next week.    Antarctica has been tons of icy fun to learn about especially the different types of penguins!  The children have enjoyed learning about penguins and for Ian and I, watching them pretending to BE penguins has proved to be very entertaining.

Did you know penguins often toboggan to get from place to place rather than walk (after all they have no knees)? Pictured above:
Marley, Esme and Rosie take off on their penguin bellies.

And, did you know, that penguins pass their eggs from penguin to penguin while standing in a group, to turn the eggs and keep them warm while they mature?  In the photo above, Oliver is balancing a plastic "penguin" egg on his feet while waddling to another penguin at circle, to pass his egg.  This is VERY hard to do, but tons of fun to try! The children enjoyed attempting to pass their eggs to a friend penguin.

This week we had a visit from Kim and Maddie Johnson, Drew's mom and big sister.  They visited Circle to share with us a book called: How to Make an Apple Pie and See The World by Margorie Priceman
While Kim read the book, Maddie pointed to the places around the globe that the little girl in the story visits, in her atlas.  The children enjoyed this story and the idea of it, traveling the globe for ingredients to make a pie, so much that we decided to create works in the classroom to illustrate the idea further.  That afternoon the children took turns representing the different continents, each with a crayon the color of the world map puzzle piece: Europe: Red, Asia: Yellow and so on.

Then other children visited the different places in search of pie ingredients, and the child with the crayon put a check mark on their shopping list.  They seemed to really enjoy this dramatic play extension. Today we continued with the idea and the children drew their own world maps, followed the directions in the book and glued pictures of the ingredients on to their map.

I'm running out of space and energy to write all that we did this week!  I hope all the kids had as much fun as we teachers did.  North America here we come!
Be well families,
Jennifer