In the Orca Class...

The learning at ICP is most often embedded in the activities we do. Not only are we having loads of fun, but we are learning all of the time!

 Early in the school year we harvested the last of our lettuce and spinach from our garden. We washed the greens and prepared a salad. 

 We peeled and cut other veggies, and added a vinaigrette that was sweet and sour. We do a lot of cooking and trying new foods in the Orca class. It is fun to watch the children try new foods and discover that they like them.

 We hung some large cloths in the treehouse. They were like hammocks, but they also seemed like a chrysalis. 

 It was kind of tricky figuring out how to get in them without falling out.

 We liked playing we were butterflies hatching out of our chrysalis (not cocoons- moths come from cocoons).

 Through trial and error we discovered that we could swing in the hammocks!

 Every year we host the Orca Reunion and invite last year's Orca class to come and play. This was a lot of friends in circle!

 We ended the day with a balloon dance party. We laughed, and laughed!

 We visited the pumpkin patch.

 We checked out the massive pumpkin peduncles (the science word for the stem).

 We had been learning about decomposers (fungus, bacteria, and invertebrates) and their important job of turning rotting things back into soil. Just look at this ooey, gooey pumpkin!

 We examined the different parts of the pumpkin, including the vines and the flowers.

 We had the opportunity to explore the farm. There are vineyards on the farm,

 and veggies. We tasted kale straight from the soil. We were brave to try it.

 We met a farm worker who was taking down some bird nets that had been put up to protect the grapes.

 It wouldn't be complete to learn about nature without experiencing the weather and it's effects. The days before we went to the pumpkin patch had been very rainy. We walked through a giant puddle. We are learning about respect, including how to walk in a puddle without splashing the people near you.

 The Orcas had chosen 4 different pumpkins to take back to the classroom, but we could only take one of them, so we had a vote. We voted with our bodies by lining up behind the pumpkin we liked best.

 Our first vote narrowed our choices from four pumpkins to two. Can you see which pumpkin was the winner?

 We each got a string and our task was to find a pumpkin that the string just fit around, not too big, or too small. It took some tried, but we did it!

 We put our big pumpkin on the scale. A friend used a scrub brush to scrub off the mud and dirt.

 Then we got to learn how the scale works. I think our pumpkin weighed close to 35 pounds.

 Next we figured out which friend weighed the same amount as our pumpkin,

 and then how many sugar pumpkins weight the same.

 Learning about nature and the plants and animals that live around us is a very important part of the learning at ICP. The Orca class goes on Nature Days when our class is held outside at some interesting place on the Island. Our first Nature Day was held at the Grand Forest. We read the signs so we would know which trail to take.

 We had been learning about deciduous and evergreen trees, and we looked for them in the forest. The trees were so tall!

 Some of the Grandfather (or maybe Grandmother) trees were not only tall, but their trunks were very big around.

 At preschool we do a lot of things to help strengthen our self-regulation, which also means self-control.  It was hard to stop and wait at every turn in the path. Some children were very good at "other regulation," which means applying the rules to other people, which is easier than applying them to oneself.

 Sometimes the path split and went two ways. We had to determine which way to go. We marked our trail by making stick arrows.

 Look! A bridge!

 Children play very differently when there is open space and no toys to fight over. Children's imaginations really blossom, and it is so much fun to observe. Here we practiced climbing and balancing on a big fallen tree. 

It was tricky in some places to walk on the slippery bark in our boots. All of this helps our developing  muscles and bodies.

 What fun splashing and swishing a stick in the water is! Once again, it takes awareness of how our actions might affect the other people around us.

 We have the opportunity on Nature Days to observe the creatures who shares these spaces with us.

We looked in a lot of holes and wondered what kind of animal might live in them.

 Look! A throne for a forest princess.

 We ate snack sitting on a fallen log. The snack parent brought bulk snack and we served ourselves into cloth snack bags that last year's Orca class had sewn. This reduces waste. We collect the leftovers for the compost bin, and we bring our own water bottles with us. We also always take a trash bag on our Natrue Days or outdoor walks and pick up any litter we see. We are learning to take care of our world.

 We discovered a pond. Some children spent a long time finding sticks and throwing them into the water to watch them float.

 Other children spent time climbing a nearby big hill and sliding down the other side.

 We came across a giant rock covered with little rock stacks, or cairns. We talked about how important it is to respect the rocks that others had added, and we found our own and left them on the giant rock.

 How many children can you fit inside a stump?

 We took our nature journals with us and spent some time drawing what we had seen in the forest. We also collected something from an evergreen tree, and something from a deciduous tree and taped these in our journals.

 The Play dough table is always popular and we get to do lots of different things there. Look at this Jack-O-Lantern face!

 We have lots of loose parts in our classroom. This arrangement took a long time. It has two pumpkin houses and lots of wonderful pathways for the animals.

 This was a fun activity. It takes good eye-hand coordination to hammer the golf tees into the pumpkin, and then to figure out how to get them back out.

 Safety first! We always wear eye protection when we are hammering.

 One day we explored the beautiful fall leaves. We like to sing a song about deciduous trees.

 The colors on the leaves were amazing.

 We made magic leaves using tempera paints.

 Like so many things in the preschool classroom, why should the adults do it if the children can do it? Helping keep our classroom clean and ready is another part of being respectful and responsible. Here are friends sharpening the colored pencils. Just look at that concentration!

 The light pads are popular.

 Here we explore fall colors and Magna Tiles, all the while learning how to cooperate, take turns, and share resources.

 Can you build a rock tower?

 What will keep the tower from falling over?

 What happens if we work together?

 We went on a fall walk. We had made large pockets to carry our treasures in. We did a tape resist of the first letter of our name, and then we laced the front and back of the pockets together. When we walk together we learn about safety rules, like looking both ways before crossing the street, and keeping your partner out of the middle of the road. We also stop and move as far to the side of the road as we can when a car is coming, and we smile and wave to the driver. Most drivers really slow down for us when we do this.

 We took a path through the woods. We looked at the trees that have ivy climbing up them. We know that ivy is not a friend of the forest as it makes trees fall over when the wind blows.

 It was a beautiful day. The leaves were all golden, and the birds were singing.

 This walk is in the neighborhood where our school is. One family has goats, which we stopped to watch and feed grass.

 We spend time every day outside on our amazing playground. Outside time gives us a lot of time for more unstructured play. This is an important part of our developing social skills, as we learn to join games, or tell someone we don't want to play, or invite someone to do something, or negotiate the rules. Add in lots of space for running, climbing, digging, water play, and  big, loud games, and we are learning a lot. It can sometimes be challenging for Teaching Parents to know how to help facilitate the play and keep everyone safe, but that is why parents are there, to learn just those kinds of things.

 This game involved a large group of children who were pretending to be eagles. They had turned the climber into their nest, and they were gathering "eggs" from all around the playground. Uh, oh! This large, yellow egg doesn't fit into the nest! An interesting challenge for the "eagles" to work out.

 Sometimes the utside play is more quiet and focused, as in this little girls work building a fairy house.

 There was lots of trial and error, and hunting for supplies to make the fairy houses just right.

 One day we harvested what was left of the giant sunflowers from the garden. Lots of the seeds were gone. Who had taken them? Oh, look! Look at all of those empty shells on the ground!

 Inside we carefully worked to get the seeds off of the sunflower.

 It was hard work. We fed the seeds to the birds in the bird feeder outside our window.

 One day we helped to paint our new Friendship Bench. First, we carried it onto our back porch. This took teamwork.

 Then we followed the design we had created to add the beautiful paint colors.

 These were special paints, and we had to work carefully,

 but Team Orca got it done!

 Here is the design we made for the painting,

 and here is the lovely finished bench. We have perennial plants and butterfly flowers planted in pots near the bench. We even have some milkweed plants for the Monarch butterflies. Eventually we will do some artwork to hang on the wall over the bench, and we plan to build a little library so that friends can read books together in this little spot in the playground.

 We do quiet reading almost every day. Sometimes we look at books alone, and sometimes it's more fun with friends.

 The Orca class takes most of the responsibility for the garden, since the children are the oldest and strongest. Here we are tasting the different mints we have growing in pots: chocolate mint, peaches and cream mint, and other.

 At the end of summer some of us helped plant some seeds for a fall crop. Here we are looking at the seedlings of spinach plants.

 We also searched the strawberry bed for any last strawberries. Later we cut off all of the runners with the daughter plants (did you know the big plants are the mother plants?), and we sent the daughters home for planting in each friend's garden.

 We picked all of the scarlet runner beans from the vine tunnel. These beans were HUGE!

 Then we drew and wrote about the garden in our nature journals. Some of us sat in the tunnel,

 and some of us worked in the bean tipi.

 There were so many different things to draw in our journals.

 We all got a "bean badge," a leaf from the bean vines that sticks to our shirts.

 We also tasted the edible flowers from the nasturtium vines. Some of us didn't like them...

 On the way back to the classroom we picked apples from a big apple tree. We used our new choppers and knives to cut the apples into little pieces.

 We put the apple pieces into the electric frying pan to cook into applesauce.

 We added some cinnamon and sugar to make it tasty, and when it was cooked, we all tried it. It was yummy!

 It was interesting opening the scarlet runner beans to find the giant beans inside.

 They look like magic beans. Just think of all of the games we can play with these!

 We decided to see if we have more evergreen or deciduous trees on our playground. First, we made an "X" on a piece of paper under which kind of tree we thought there were more of.

 Then we went outside to count. Some friends had a clipboard to make x's for every evergreen tree, and others had clipboards to make x's for the deciduous trees. 

 Other friends had paint to mark each tree once it had been counted.

 Guess which kind of tree we had more of?

 Once, during quiet reading we found a book that showed how a baby grows inside the mother's belly. We found this fascinating to look at and try to understand.

 A family donated a turning compost bin for the garden. We had to work together to get the heavy box out to the garden.

 The garden had really begun to change as we got farther into fall. Look! Slimy black leaves.

 I found a bean,

 and I found more. Look how big they are!

 The children worked together to make sure they had gotten all of the beans off before they began to pull the old vines from the tipi.

 The rest of the class tried to figure out how to put the compost bin together.

 It was hard work. We looked at the directions with the pictures, and had to find the right pieces to go together. It was too hard for us to finish, so a parent will come back and finish it for us.

 We got all of the bean vines off of the tipi, and then we used scissors to cut them into smaller pieces to be ready to go in the compost bin.

 This boy worked hard to bring the moldy pumpkins to the garden.

 We put them in a corner of the garden. We had read a book called, "Pumpkin Jack," about a boy whose rotten pumpkin eventually grew a new pumpkin vine from some seeds that were left inside the old jack-o-lantern. Maybe that will happen to our.

 We went on a fall scavenger hunt. We had a list of things to find and mark.

 Look how many I have found!

 Our second nature day was held in our little town. There were lots of signs to read. We needed to follow the path along the waterfront, so we were always looking for the trail sign.

 There was some construction going on near the park. We watched them work, and we looked closely at the machines.

 We discovered a manhole, and had quite a talk about what they are for.

 Here's a sign that reminds us not to pour anything into the storm drains as they dump right into Eagle Harbor. There were Orcas on the sign!

 We checked out where we were on the map. It was interesting to figure out what the legend on the map was, and find the different things on the map.

We discovered an evergreen huckleberry and tasted the purple berries. 

 More signs at the harbor.

 These are cool rock sculptures. How did they get the rocks to stay together? Having had some experience with stacking rocks, we knew they must have used something else, but what?

 At the end of the path we came to a dock that led out to the marina. There were schools of little fish swimming under the dock, and we all got down to see them through the cracks.

 Some children in class had been very interested in playing restaurant, so we made a reservation to have our snack at a restaurant in town. We learned how to act respectfully in a restaurant, and the waiter kindly explained his job to us.

 We ordered french fried and juice.

 As a part of our soclial sutdies learning we spend a lot of time thinking about our families. The Orcas have brought in their "All About Me" books which are filled with pictures of their family and pets. These books will go home a couple more time through the year for the children to add to. We love to have family members come to school to visit, and one day we invited our grandparents to come.

 It is interesting to think of our grandparents as children, but everyone had a chance to share one of the favorite things they like or liked to do as a child. It is amazing how many children say the same things the grandparents said. Not one child mentioned their ipads or video games.

 Some children had worked together to create a fairy land. They had painted a night sky and then poked holes in it for tiny white light stars. They had worked together to make the places for the houses, incliding the pathways, a pond with island, and a fire pit. Then they made houses for the fairies. This little girl enjoyed playing here with her grandma.

 The Orcas were there the day the dump truck delivered the huge pile of compost. They were surprised that it was warm (the decomposers at work), and that it smelled (also the decomposers).

 We worked together to load it into the garden art, and then we put it down on top of newspapers that were covering part of the grass by the garden fence. We want to see what the decomposers will do the the grass, and the newspapers. We hope they will work hard this winter so that in spring we can plant herbs and flowers.

 Working together on big projects feels good and helps bond us. An impromptu ring around the rosie happened on the way back to the classroom,

 followed by a group hug.

 One day we read the story of Stone Soup. In the story, which takes place in China, a village had gone through tough times and the villagers no longer worked together or trusted each others. They were suspicious of outsiders. Along came three monks, who taught them about how good it feels to work together and share by making soup from a stone. We all brought a veggie for the soup. We also acted out the story. Here the villagers have all added their veggies to the soup and are waiting for a serving.

 We cut our veggies into small pieces and put them into the big soup pot.

 Then we added a stone. Yes, a real stone! The children wondered how it would make the soup taste.

 While the soup cooked we set a table fit for an emperor. Once again, we had to work together to make it just right.

 Then we all got dressed up to have our feast.

The soup was delicious! Some children crushed up crackers to go in the soup. One boy was very brave to try the soup. He wasn't sure he would like it, but he tried. Another boy had 4 bowls! What a great day!