Green School

It's finally Friday!!  Well, technically, my Friday was on Wednesday since we haven't had any students yesterday or today!  Yesterday was an AWESOME day that we got to spend planning with our teams and working in our classrooms to get stuff done.  How wonderful is that!!  Today is a day full of meetings, and there is NO SCHOOL on Monday for ANYONE!!  :-)

One of the meetings I will be attending today is for our Green School Committee, otherwise known as The Green Team.  We are trying to get our school to qualify for our state's BayWise Program.  Since we live so close to the Chesapeake Bay, many of our streams and waterways dump into the Bay.  So, we're trying to teach our students the importance of caring for our environment.  One of the ways we're doing that is by assigning each grade level environmentally friendly activities.  For example, in kindergarten we will be planting native Maryland trees (including an AWESOME butterfly bush), we will be building butterfly houses, hatching chickens from eggs in an incubator, participating with our first grade classes to identify the trees around our school for a Nature Walk Scavenger Hunt, and collecting Entenmann's Little Bites Pouches as part of their Tera Cycle Brigade.

All of our  students will be bringing in their pouches and our kindergartners will be responsible for the collection and counting of the pouches so that they can be sent out and our school will earn some money!!  I think my favorite part is going to be building butterfly houses for our butterfly bush.  We've never done that before!!

See how HUGE our butterfly bush got over the summer?!?!  It has been trimmed down and is in the process of regrowing, which has provided awesome lesson opportunities in our classrooms!

On a separate note, since we only had a three-day week for the students this week, my Art Center became a 'snowy field'.  How, you ask?  Well, I'll tell you!!  I took shaving cream and covered the entire Art Center table, and the littles were allowed to use their fingers to write any words they wanted to our to draw whatever pictures they wanted.  Bonus: it was a great way to get the table cleaned and the room smelled pretty good all week, too!

They had SO VERY MUCH FUN with this simple activity!!  Whelp, gotta get back to my meetings!  We have a three day weekend, so I wish you a very happy weekend for however long yours is!!