Spring at ICP

It's been an early spring here in Washington, and our classes have all been enjoying a lot of outside time. On the first day of spring we made spring crowns and magic wands and we came outside to wake up the earth.

The Sea Otters really enjoyed this.

We looked at how the plants are waking up, and we chanted "Wake up the earth! Wake up the earth!"

We found some bugs and worms to observe.

We also painted bird houses to put out in the orchard on our playground.

We have been learning about plants and how they grow. We know plants need sun, water, soil and air. We planted popcorn seeds in zip bags and hung them in the window. We also have planted giant sunflower seeds.

There are two kinds of sunflower seeds, and we have been drawing and writing our observations in our sunflower journals. These flowers could grow 16 feet tall!

The Dolphin class explored daffodils.

We learned about the different parts of the flower as we disected them.

Then we glued the parts down to paper so we could share them at home.

A large part of spring is learning about the birds. We made nesting caches and hung them in the trees in the wildlife sanctuary. 

We also hung pieces of yarn from the branches, hoping the birds would come and use these to help build their nests.

We have painted bird houses to hang in the orchard, and the Orca class is making tin can bird feeders to hang there as well.

Of course we did a little rainbow play. The children loved these colorful hand print rainbows. They used primary paints, mixing them on their hands to create the rainbow.

A clever mom brought a rainbow snack to eat!