What have we been up to lately

It has been a while since I last wrote on the blog, so what has been going on at Art and Soul Preschool?!

Well, Spring time is always a time of a lot of growth and wonderment and we certainly have been experiencing a great deal of both.

One of our recent activities was to measure how much the children have grown and to mark that growth with sunflowers they made.  In addition to making their sunflowers, we planted sunflower seeds in the yard, come late summer we will see how tall these flowers will really become.

Here is their process:

Some children painted their sunflowers and added sunflowers seeds.

While others chose to paint their paper in the colors they wanted their sunflowers to be, and then rip or cut their petals and  add to plates which they glued their sunflower seeds to.  It was interesting to see the choices the children made for their artwork.

Painting paper to use for petals

While I worked with the little artists making the flowers my Co-Teacher and Assistant talked about how the children have grown and measured their height in the hallway.

Some of our little flowers demonstrating how tall they are.

They look very sweet going down our hallway at school.

Our Sunflowers inside are not the only flowers we have been watching grow. 

We received a wonderful donation of two flats of Zinnia plants from Greene Bee Greene House!

The children spent a couple days planting these and our hope is that this summer they will be able to take home summer bouquets to their families.

A couple of our students also found some wormy friends while we were planting.

We love spending time outside, finding nature treasures, walking, planting and playing.

Here is one of our nature walks where the children gathered items for a "feely box" activity.

Here the children are trying to guess what nature item is in the box using their sense of touch

I also posted these pictures on Facebook of the children discovering some baby bunnies, but they are so cute, they needed to be re-visited.

We made sure not to touch them, and later they all had hopped away, we were a little worried for a time.

We actually discovered them while playing with our parachute, another well loved activity.

While we have been talking a lot about growth and new life, we also tried to capture a little bit of this age in a key chain for Mother's Day.

This time instead of focusing on how big they are getting we shrunk down their hand prints to preserve, as well as made shrinky-dink  Mamas.  

I love all their little interpretations of their Mommies.

What a busy time of growth and change, and these are just couple highlights from these past weeks, more to come soon.