Spring is in the air!

With the official arrival of Spring, we are emerging and exposing ourselves in the fresh beauty. Spring is my favorite season :) On the first day of Spring we did a few activities to celebrate the occasion. My goal was to post this days ago, but life has been quite busy with deadlines, and Spring Break activities :)

We began the morning discussing "what happens during Spring?" with some book look time. Book Look time doesn't involve physically reading..it is just as it sounds, we look at the book and her or I ask questions as we go. The books are basically a tool for discussion prompts. Luckily, I have a small personal collection of books leftover from my teaching days. The library is also a wonderful resource.

As I was planning our activities, I realized our books fit into great Spring categories/themes.

Gardening/Plant Growth

Bird Life Cycle

Earth Day

Butterfly Life Cycle

Bugs, Bugs, and more bugs

Since Spring is a time of birth and re-birth, when book look was over, I read this book(and another) to get us further going. It seemed a little above Em's comprehension level, although she did identify with the plants growing and eating food to grow pages. This lets me know, the concept living vs. non-living is a great place to continue our Spring study.

I chose to read one more book because it connected with our previous seed planting adventure. This is a wonderful book about a few kids that plant a garden with seeds given to them from their mother. The adventure starts because mom doesn't tell them what type of seeds they are...it's a surprise! As time passes, change begins to happen. Growth is happening everywhere! The book continues on through the season of Spring into the season of summer and harvest. The author did a wonderful job incorporating counting and observation skills(logical-mathematical intelligence) along with naturalist skills. 

The last page is my favorite. What a chart and great visual stimulation(spatial intelligence). We looked for seeds we planted in our garden :)

Little Em was pretty much done with books so we moved on to a bodily-kinesthetic activity that also involved her intrapersonal intelligence with dress-up time! Dress up time is a constant in our house! A favorite being comes and visits during the Spring...who could that be??

For every holiday I love to decorate the house. As we decorated Em started her own imaginary play with this basket of eggs. She cooked, hid, sorted, mixed&matched, and counted the eggs. She was entertained the whole time I was decorating :)

Later in the day, we continued our fun with a nature walk(naturalist and bodily-kinesthetic) to hunt for SIGNS OF SPRING and added a few Spring poems(linguistic intelligence) to our poem collection.

For our nature walk we went up the road to a local nature park. The trick here is there are no toys at this park..it is really more of a preserved natural area. Many cities are trying to create these type of environments. I encourage you to see if your local city has one...or heck, your backyard could already even be one :)

Daddy came with us :)

Right away he spotted a caterpillar! Em and I walked right past it. Can u tell he was a Boy scout?

Fresh spring rain on a native Oregon Lupine

Cherry blossoms

Leftovers from winter

Not sure, but it looked neat

We also saw daffodils, wild roses, lots of new buds popping of branches, ducks, field mice(EEWWW), and hawks! The best part about nature walks is how your child's ever-emerging personality shines through  in new environments :)Em wanted to truck up this big hill and loved every minute up and down it! She is quite the hiker!! Looks like I need to plan a few summer hikes :)

Spring Sprung,
~M.I.MaMa