Hanging Out with the Big Kids

 Today we had a guest Turtle in our class! GK's dad Chris came to play and read us stories to help us celebrate GK's birthday! Chris read us two books, with LOTS of help from GK.

 Matthew also shared with us the news of his upcoming trip. He is leaving today to fly on an airplane to visit his cousins in California!

Then we set out for the day's adventure over to the Lower School playground. First we stopped to check out our mud. It looks like the water and the mud are separating, which is perfect for brick making!

 On the way to the big playground, we encountered a problem! Some Turtles were getting very upset when they were not the first ones to get to the bush, tree, or rock pile. It made them so sad, that we decided to stop and have a meeting about it.

Luckily, we were on the big kid playground, so we asked a couple of big kids to help us think about the problem. They had some ideas about how to create a rotation schedule so that it would be fair. This is a problem that we will keep on thinking about together.

 Once we got to the big playground, we had soooo much fun climbing, running, biking, swinging, and playing with the big kids!

So Much To Do...

After a bit of busy building first thing, the Turtles got ready for Morning Meeting. We read a new book,  The Recess Queen, and talked about the problems in the story.

Next, our elephant friend came to visit us again, to help us decide about who should be the main characters in our digital storybook.

He tried to use the "One Boss" method, but the Turtles weren't happy with that, so we decided to try the voting method, and each of the Turtles put their name above the character they wanted. Since we've narrowed it down, tomorrow we are going to try making our final choice through consensus.

At Choice Time, the Turtles were very happy to play with the Tube Racer again, and found some new methods to construct it and a finish line. We also added colors to all the keys on the keyboard, and friends were interested in figuring out how to play some familiar songs.

We went for a walk to the Lower School, and managed to find a few mud puddles on the way. We were off to return the cameras to Kathy's Kindergarten class, but we got distracted by many interesting people and sites along the way.

We saw butterflies in the Pre-K room,

family members in the hallways, art all over the place, and

a Luna moth in the Raj's Kindergarten! It seemed everywhere that we went, there were things to see and people to talk to. We barely made it back in time for our goodbye song!

Happy Earth Day!

Today was a glorious day for Earth Day! We planted herbs, marigolds, tomatos, peas, and lettuce in our newly built raised beds.

We also had a visit from the Kindergarteners who were doing an Earth Day Parade. They sang us a song the the kindergarten teacher, Raji, wrote just for Earth Day.

Next Debbie Green read us some Earth Day books including Todd Parr's, The Earth Book.

The last book of the day, Max and Art was very useful to the Turtles because we have been talking so much about being illustrators.