Friday was our final bash of the year – pizza party for the Butterfly class and an opportunity to say farewell to the 4K children who will be attending other schools next year. Lots of pizza and homemade ice cream and sorbet with strawberries the children picked at their recent field trip to Ambrose Farms. Sleeping at naptime Friday was not an issue….

Our recent kindergarten graduation and family picnic could not have been nicer! Weather was great at the Stern Center Gardens and recipes for all the food families brought are being compiled into a book. We even had a strolling musician, thanks to one of our alumni children who brought his viola to share. The Butterflies have been writing and performing impromptu plays for the past several weeks during their center and writing workshop time, so it seemed only natural that they decided to include a short play written especially to share with their families for their graduation. As the focus of their ongoing interest in superheroes has been fairly equally divided between fairies and transformers, they integrated these themes into a story they called “Captured in a Woodland Forest.” They also collaboratively wrote two poems, “We Love Fairies” and “Transformers are Awesome!” to recite at the ceremony. Their poems (& pics) :

Transformers are Awesome

They hide behind disguises-

Motorcycles, trucks, and big or fast cars.

With blasters and swords they use their powers to save.

Without their powers they aren’t very fast.

But now they can zoom!

We Love Fairies

They use magical powers to change things-

Giving sweet dreams and making them come true.

They hide, tiny creatures in our homes;

Half human, half butterfly

They sparkle and glow;

They are beautiful.

Seashells and Sunflowers love to help with gardening chores (especially watering). Here they lend a helping hand (supervising) re-planting the window boxes on our playhouses.

We always look forward to the annual World Cultures Fair, sponsored by the School of School of Languages, Cultures, and World Affairs, which was held recently in the Stern Center Garden – it is an event that really represents the emphasis we place in our curriculum on celebrating the diversity among our children and their families. The Stern Center Garden is also one of our children’s favorite spaces on campus, especially the “bamboo forest” from which we have harvested lots of bamboo stalks for all kinds of different things. The Butterfly class visited the fair, made new friends, and enjoyed many of the activities, especially the music!

Our Butterfly children are showing remarkable restraint and understanding about the fragility of the life cycle. We have milkweed growing in their garden, the preferred food for monarch butterflies and site for deposit and growth of the crysalis that eventually becomes a new monarch. The children have identified the location of a number of them in various places around the playground in addition to those in the garden. As a result, of their own accord they have roped off some of their favorite play spaces, including the tunnel under the climber, a bench, and part of their potting bench/mud kitchen area. They are willing to forego play in those areas to keep the crysalides safe until they hatch. It is rewarding to see the care and concern they have displayed – we don’t think they have too much longer to wait.

The theme of our recent Play Day picnic this year was “Playground Explore,” focusing on the newer activity areas we created this year to prepare for certification as a habitat. We:
- rejuvenated our outdoor art frame with painted dinosaur puzzle pieces
- washed baby dolls and clothes in the village
- had “special” ingredients to use in the mud kitchen
- used the potting bench to prepare seedlings for the garden
- experimented with a metal detector in the archaeology dig
We also had a special visitor, Greg Guay, who played classical guitar with Jonathan who is one of his students. He was a wonderful help in our new music area also, showing children many things they could do with our outdoor instruments. Weather was perfect, and we enjoyed seeing many of our “alumni” children again and welcoming and meeting many of our new incoming families next fall. Thanks to Evy for her hard work on the signs and her helpers, Mae, Anaya, Tulah, and Maria – they were a huge hit and we are trying to figure out a way to have the children design the permanent signs we will be putting up to designate the play areas. Also thanks to all the teachers and parents who coordinated the event. Funds raised helped us meet our goal to purchase an awning to shade our new seating area on the steps.

The Bear Cave that has been in the Seashell class for the past couple of weeks has migrated to the Sunflower Class, which turned it into a Rock Cave. The Sunflowers are doing a LOT of things with rocks -and we have found it to be a topic of high, high interest, so we may be on this for some time. In these photos, spelunkers Caroline and Noah are checking out rocks on the light table; Caroline says to me, “this is my Rock Buddy to the rescue” and Valerie studies an interesting specimen (VERY closely). We’ll check back with this in a bit.

We now have 2 birdhouses thanks to Eric Draper, local environmental advocate & friend of ECDC! In his spare time (who has any of that?) he designs and builds homes for birds out of 100% recycled materials. We had a choice of two different designs but then he graciously just said, “let’s put them both up” so the hole-digging proceeded, one in the garden and the other in a spot in the back of the playground that we decided was very “feng-shui.” We learned from Eric that if you put a little tiny bit of nesting material inside the empty house, birds are more likely to choose it for their home. So now we are just waiting to see what happens.

Thanks to dad Tim C., we now have an official rain gauge! Tim brought one of his graduate students over to install – the biggest challenge was finding a spot that had 360 degree unimpeded access – I guess we have more stuff on our playground than we thought! We waited and waited and waited, but it finally rained so we could measure and it was worth it, as we had nearly a half an inch the first time we read it. So now our kids will learn a new measurement word – millimeters. Thanks, Tim – we’re sure this will be a popular visiting spot from now on as long as we can keep it mulch-free (an inside joke)

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