It’s spring and all the children at ECDC are very busy with outdoor activities and the much improved weather, which includes digging in earnest – of course everywhere EXCEPT the areas on the playground designed for that purpose. The children are particularly interested in excavating anything that might reveal critters underneath. Over the course of the past few weeks, some of our more dedicated diggers in the Sunflower class unearthed most the landscaping stones on the playground looking for roly-polies and centipedes. So Dr. Candy went to the local stone yard and bought them some fairly large boulders to roll, push, turn upside down, dig around, etc. Ms. Phyllis is channeling their obvious interest in dirt to a study of things that live in the earth. We have been learning all about roly-polies, snails and worms. The sensory table is full of dirt, pretend bugs and worms. Children have been spotted pretending to be roly-polies and we ordered worms to make a “worm garden” and then promptly spent the next morning rounding up all the worms that escaped overnight! 
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The Sunflowers LOVE pizza! In fact, we love it so much that we have immersed our entire curriculum into learning about pizza. We have made homemade pizza at school, read lots of books about the history of pizza as well as funny pizza stories, played pizza counting and patterning games, and even made finger painted pizzas! As a culmination, today we went on a special field trip to Andolini’s. The children got to watch the pizza being made and have a yummy pizza lunch. 
What do you see missing from this photo? Yes, the leaves are a bit on the “chewed” side. Yesterday, Ms. Phyllis brought three children in from the playground with this twig, after observing that they were eating the leaves! Good thing we are incredibly vigilant about plant toxicity and careful to consult with the posted lists of safe plants and for good measure, our Head Groundskeeper, Patey Cowden, whenever we plant something new! We double-checked just to make sure, and THEN the questions began – “why were you eating plant leaves, how did you get the idea to do that?” The three children with the straightest face you can imagine shrugged their shoulders and said, “we were pretending to be ladybugs!” Then they proceeded to explain they know ladybugs eat aphids, and aphids eat leaves, therefore they had to eat leaves if they were going to be ladybugs. How can you argue with that kind of logic? This anecdote is a perfect example of the delicate “dance” we do every day to balance young children’s natural curiosity and desire to explore the world with our grown-up needs to keep them safe and healthy!
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.