More Friends and Birds to Come

Hello everyone,

We are wrapping up our unit on friendship this week, and it has been a lovely thing to be examining with the kids. Thank you so much to everyone who came to the friends day potluck last Friday! That was an incredible feast and a fun celebration of community.

This week Ginger read the beautiful, poetic book The Other Way to Listen by Byrd Baylor, and practiced extending our friend making abilities and listening skills to the non-human entities around us. We read Leo Lionni's classic story Swimmy about small fish working together to scare away the big fish, and talked about cooperation and it's importance. We played a chasing/cooperation game based on the book and made fish print paintings. Today Arielle is reading another friendship adventure classic, Little Blue and Little Yellow, and will be making a color mixing painting activity. Tomorrow is cooking day and we hope to be taking advantage of this fine weather to enjoy some camaraderie and cook over the open fire again.

We had some gorgeous sunny weather this week and we have heard increasing bird songs at the forest each day. We are watching the camellias slowly open up more and more. We caught sight of a hummingbird feeding in a blossomed out tree, and had an amazing view of a bald eagle in full adult plumage soaring low over the upper reservoir, considering eating some bufflehead ducks. The buffleheads escaped.

When we get back from break we will be focusing on birds and music for the month of March. See you next week for conferences!