September Notes

September has been filled with lots of pleasant, sunny days so far. The mornings have been cool enough to make some fires. We've been singing our Kindling the Fire song together as we add kindling. Some of the kids have been helping saw and split logs, and practicing with magnifying glasses and ferro rods as firestarters.

We've noticed many plants around us going to seed. Some of the burrs even stick to our clothes. We like to tell the kids that the plants are using us to help move their seeds around. We love finding the jewelweed seeds by the bridge that swell and then pop when our fingers touch them, sending out a burst of seeds.

We've had a lot of big walnuts dropping and we've been rolling them around in boxes filled with different colors of paint to make marbled paintings. It's a really fun style of action painting and can be done with a couple of friends. We've also been paying attention to the spicebush plant, which grows all over Fairywood and has bright red berries this time of year. The Monday class collected some leaves, twigs and berries from spicebush to make a nice tasty tea.

The mud kitchen was filled with gem corn from the garden and inspired a lot of dramatic play and glue art creations. We've also seen a lot of mermaid adventure play in the forest and playing group hiding games like Howl and Seek and Sardines.

We've been doing three different air pressure science experiments the past week. We added a few video demonstrations at the end of the post.