This is one of my most favorite moments in of the year… Watching third grade students confidently pick up a compass and set it up properly ready to be used! They have been learning how to use a map and compass since they were five years old and I LOVE knowing I am sending them out into the world with some map reading skills! Our grand finale of an activity is an orienteering course and the third grade students had a great time looking for the markers and clipping their cards!
Here at HPS we have over 100 green beans growing in our second grade classrooms! These green beans will be headed home in a week or so. We have learned alot about what seeds need to grow and now we have an interesting experiment going on with a few of our plants. The students are anxiously awaiting to see if their hypothesis are correct about what happens to a seed left in the dark or left in the cold ….or what happens if a seed is only fed apple juice or Gatorade or chocolate milk! Hmmmmmm…… I guess we’ll find out!
We LOVE our garden! We have been enjoying the bulbs that we planted back in the fall and have been getting the garden beds ready for more planting …and we have fun SO MANY worms! 🙂 Turtle Island is the perfect place to learn about the roots, weeds, insects, worms, and flowers that we have in our garden. If you would like to help care for our plants over the summer keep an eye out for a sign up to care of the garden a few days during our vacation!
With the warmer weather we have been noticing snakes out enjoying the sun on the trails. This is an animal that some students can be afraid, which is understandable, but sometimes it helps to just learn a little more about these long little fellas! We made some adorable googley-eyed popsicle stick friends and even got to touch some snake skin! …and now we know these little snakes aren’t here to hurt us. We can let them escape quietly and they can just go about their day. 🙂
We have donated ALOT of still good food to the Nashua Soup Kitchen, but we also are able to donate any slightly expired veggies to a guinea pig rescue center in Brookline, NH. It is called Wheektopia and they have over 70 rescued guinea pigs! These are Mrs. Happy’s guinea pigs she got from the rescue center. Their names are Floofy and Mr. Squirrels. Food is not trash!
Field Trip to Mrs. Happy’s House!!!! Well…. a virtual one anyways! Since we couldn’t make our maple syrup here at HPS I took the sap home and took lots of pictures during the LONG syrup making process. Students even got to meet Blue, Little Cat and Velcro who always help me in the kitchen! A definite highlight of the day was when every student got to taste a spoonful of delicious syrup from the maple trees in our forest! YUM!
The sap is FLOWING! …and we are all super excited to start to collect it and bring it to Mrs. Happy’s car so she can take it home and turn it into syrup for us to taste. We even had the chance to taste the sap itself!
First Grade students are tree tapping professionals! We now have six sugar maple trees tapped and each class is eagerly awaiting to see how much sap their bucket will collect!
Second graders are in charge of collecting and sorting all of the dried out markers that our school produces …and that’s alot of markers! Instead of just throwing them into the trash we do our best to make the most of these used up markers. One of the things we do to help the art teacher is to make watercolor paint to be used with all of her classes! Just plop the markers into a jar of water and wait to watch all the ink come out! Try it at home too!
Every student at HPS has the chance to snowshoe every year! What makes me the most happy is to watch the older students being able put on their snowshoes all by themselves! …Kindergarten still needs some help. 🙂 Thank you to all the parent volunteers who have been helping …even Office Nick was able to join us for some snowshoe adventures!
