Marching On to MARCH!

I cannot believe March is here!  And WHERE has this blogger been?  Busy, busy, busy for sure.

Here's a little update about what's been happening in the Learning Garden:

First and foremost, our artists have been working with us to prepare our wall mural for downstairs.  The kids are so excited about doing this.  On Monday, a crew from The Education Channel will be here filming us as we work with our artists on the tiles for the mural.  I'll keep you posted about when this should air and maybe some of you could record it for those of us who do not get the Education Channel!

And speaking of artists...check this out.  We had an artist from Ringling come and join us one day last week to share his illustrations for a children's book he's written.  Adam came in and read the story and shared the illustrations on the ActivBoard.  The kids LOVED IT!  They gave him amazing feedback and even talked to him about how his pictures tapped into their schema!  I love these learners...they just make me SO PROUD.  :-)

And our learning for the past two weeks has taken us "out of this world" as we did a little study about space.  We tied this in with the reading skill of understanding reality and fantasy.  And, of course, this theme has "art" written all over it!  The kids have worked hard creating pictures, stories and art projects depicting reality and fantasy.  Here's a little sample:  

 Here are a couple of examples:

And this unit will take us right into one of my favorite authors:  DR. SEUSS!  We'll be learning about his work starting March 2nd, his birthday.  We started by decorating our classroom tree for this unit.  Check out the cute little "things" hanging from our tree!  Aren't they the sweetest??  I let them take one smiling picture and one silly.  I think it's funny that silly equates to sticking the tongue out for most of them.  Still, these pictures make ME smile and they will you, too, when they come home later this month.