Squirrels and nuts and the equinox

Originally published Sept 17th

Hello everyone,

We had a really awesome week! We are settling into routine, deepening our social and emotional practices at morning circle time and stretching our focus time out. We are forming relationships and practicing some new school communication skills and manners. We are building strength and endurance for our daily walk and active play. We are also learning about squirrels! We played squirrel and built a drey, practiced moving like squirrels and played Simon Squirrel Says, and did a little squirrel obstacle course. We read Squirrels Leap, Squirrels Sleep, Frisky Brisky Hippity Hop, The Busy Little Squirrel, The Secret Life of Squirrels, and Scaredy Squirrel. On Thursday we made homemade bread and homemade peanut butter. We watched the yeast come alive and everyone kneaded their bread dough themselves for at least 5 minutes. We set it in a sunny spot to rise and then cracked and shelled the peanuts ourselves for peanut butter, just like a bunch of busy little squirrels. We shelled a lot of peanuts! Later we watched the peanuts turn into peanut butter in the food processor and tried some peanut butter on our fresh, warm bread. I love this cooking activity because it shows the basic process of making a couple of foods; bread and peanut butter, that many of us see and partake of quite frequently. I also love it because it is so hands on. Kneading dough and cracking shells and picking out the peanuts is excellent fine motor practice for young children. All of us sat there shelling together for about 20 minutes, and a couple of people stayed at the table and shelled peanuts for about an hour! We will have one more week of squirrels and then move on to focusing on seeds.

The Autumnal Equinox, (not the mountain or the hotel,) is coming this week, marking the first day of fall. We will be having a brief Equinox gathering at the school on Tuesday at 5-5:30 pm. Please come with your family if you can, and bring a couple of natural and biodegradable objects for the altar, one representing something from summer and one representing something about fall. It is nice to pick out these items and talk about them together beforehand with your child. For the gathering we will place our items together on the altar and those so inclined can share why we brought them, and then we will do a couple of poems and songs, and have some apple bread and mint tea.

We had some lovely weather and wildlife viewing this week. There is a great blue heron that is often at the pond near my house, and we saw it a couple of times this week, once quite close in the field by the barns. It was pretty exciting to see it take off! We found new mushrooms springing up in the forest. We heard some crows, jays, saw some turkey vultures and found lots of slugs. We can watch chickadees as they come to the feeder in the play yard, and hear them say their name. Get ready for some rain on Wednesday and Thursday of next week.

Thanks for the mint and apples! We have been making some sun tea already, and I'm going into production on some more apple fruit leather this weekend.

Please remember that this week and possibly next week are likely the tiredest that your kids will be all school year. And potty accidents and being too distracted to finish eating lunch are very normal at this point. Just fyi, we all sit down together at lunch time, we talk about what we are grateful for, and we chat. Zena and I sit with the children and encourage them to remain seated, drink water, finish a decent portion of their food, and pack everything up when they are done. Children who stay for aftercare take their lunches out again later in the day and have a chance to finish up. If they finish all of their lunch food and are still hungry, we would provide them with additional snacks. There is ample time and space to eat, but it is understandable if people are not finishing all of their lunches at this point. This is still a new routine and a new social group. The opportunity to play and interact is very exciting, and the natural drive to take advantage of that time to play is powerful. With routine and familiarity, many children will be able to tune into the needs of their bodies and fill up as necessary. Some children may always eat more at home than at school though. My own children completely change their eating routines when in school vs not in school, and I have just come to expect that change in the fall.

May you be happy, may you be healthy, may you be peaceful, may you be filled with joy,
Jessica