Adventures In WES Preschool!

 VINS We had an educator from VINS come today to talk about raptors and show us three different bird.  The preschoolers were amazing listeners and learned all sorts of facts about raptors.  Ask your preschoolers what they remember from the visit. Some facts we learned: Raptor are meet eaters.  Meet eaters are carnivores.  Owls hunt at night.  Animals who are awake at night are nocturnal. Owl wings don't make noise, so they can sneak up on prey when they hunt.  Owl eyes take up 2/3 of their head. birds have 10-25 bones in their neck versus our 7. Ithaca - a red shouldered hawk Pre-K through 2nd grade watching the VINS show. Falcon The preschoolers paying close attention to the presenter. Eastern Screech Owl

West Fairlee Town Library Once a year, Vi, who prepares breakfast and lunch at WES and helps run the town library, invites the preschoolers to walk to the West Fairlee Town Library to check it out.  She reads some books to the kids, feeds them a snack and sets up an art activity for them to do while they're at the library.  For many of the students, it is their first exposure to the town library.  On Wednesday, we headed over for our yearly visit.  We all had a great time!

 Spring is here and the tricycles are back out!   It's amazing to see the progress between the beginning of the year and now when it comes to the kids biking abilities.  At the beginning of the year, many of the kids struggled to bike around our loop and only a handful could make it up our small hill without help from a teacher.  Now, ALL of our students can make it up the hill and they love riding loop after loop.  We even have a handful of kids riding a two wheeler without training wheels!  Very impressive all around!   Gardening! The preschoolers also helped us clean up the school gardens.  They pulled weeds, moved dirt, and smoothed out the raised beds to prepare them for planting.

 Sand Brigade! A load of sand for our sandbox was delivered and dumped outside our playground yesterday afternoon.  We have quite a job in front of us to move all of the sand from the walkway to the sandbox.  Luckily, we had 9 willing workers this morning.  I have a feelings that we will be putting them to work for several days to come. Team work! Filling the buckets and delivering the sand.   Run! More buckets to fill!

Sugaring at Ms. L's We couldn't have asked for a more beautiful day for our field trip to Ms. L's house.  The sun was out, the temps were in the high 50s and most of the snow had already melted. Our preschool class has been reading books and learning all about how trees produce sap, how to tap trees to get the sap, and then how to turn that sap into syrup.  We spent two or three weeks learning about the process and collecting sap from the maple tree on our playground, and then last week we hiked to Ms. L's house via Southworth Park and the woods.  At Ms. L's house we collected more sap and then got to check out the whole boiling operation at her house.  In addition to watching the sap being boiled into syrup, we got to check out her chickens, collect eggs, play in her big field and enjoy waffles with our newly boiled syrup for snack as well as a hotdog, chips and carrot lunch.  It was truly a fun filled day. Collecting sap at school. Walking to Ms. L's to collec...