Come What May

 

 

Hello, everyone! I hope everyone has had a good start to May so far - it's hard to believe the month is already halfway over. We have just five more weeks of school left at FMLCS, and things have been a weird mixture of calm and busy. We've spent a lot of time outside, enjoying the sunshine and fresh air. It's done the Agents a world of good so far; I think they stored a whole season's worth of energy during every inside recess, and now they're finally able to let some of that energy out.

 

The Agents have had a very arty April and May. It feels like every week we're breaking out the aprons for a big project. First it was our birdhouses. In Social Studies we've been working on a unit about Community Helpers, and just before Spring Break we finished up a subunit on carpenters and painters. To show how they work together to make the community beautiful, we sanded and painted birdhouses.

 

 

Also before Spring Break, we learned about Easter by doing this nifty little craft I'll have to find the link for. We turned two ordinary paper plats into Jesus's tomb, and used my handy-dandy laminator to make our new Bible character puppets durable - that way they can act out the Easter story again and again following the story we printed and pasted to the back of the 'tomb'. We also made hot cross buns, a traditional Easter pastry, but I don't think the kids enjoyed this nearly as much as they enjoyed catching the plastic pockets as they came out of the laminator.

 

 

Then along came Spring Break, which now feels a million years distant, and the near-completion of a project that has been in the works for months:  our school library. It was at first a daunting task, as it required pulling all two thousand of our books off the shelves, sorting them several times over, and then putting them all back. When people came into the classroom during Phase I, they looked at me like I was clinically insane.

 

Who would do this to themselves.

Who, I ask?

Well, it might have taken forever and a lot of muscle, but boy was it worth it.

That's right, look who's laughing now!

Me.

I'm the one laughing.

Also I finally figured out how to organize the ukuleles so they look less like they were haphazardly tossed wherever and more like they were put there carefully and on purpose. I might be more proud of this than the library, actually, and it took less than ten seconds to set up.

So beautiful.

We returned to school the following week, and the Agents were so happy to be reunited you'd think they were separated years rather than days. The next couple of weeks were both quiet and busy - quiet with work, busy with sneaky Mother's Day projects. Miss Athena from Little Treasures Childcare included the Agents in the preschool's project:  fancy pottery and nifty flowers. The kids loved painting the pottery and I have it on good authority the flowers are coming nicely. Thanks, Miss Athena!

 

 

For our class project, we made an interview video letting our Agent mothers know how many things there are we love about them. I love making videos like this with the Agents, because you never know what they're going to say or how they're going to react to various questions. We decorated printable DVDs and made DVD cases from cardstock and stickers to complete the gift, and all three mothers were thrilled to bits! I wish I'd gotten pictures of the DVDs and their cases, but I do have the video. Behold, our Agents in all their adorable splendor!
 

 

I hope to have a blooper reel made sometime this week - look for it on Facebook!

 

Last week we took a field trip into Portland for a Kinderkonzert. The Portland Symphony Orchestra hoses a series of concerts that focus on each instrument family. The Kinderkonzert we attended was focused on brass instruments, which is fitting considering I'm a brass player. It was pretty snazzy, and I'm pleased to report that our Agents were some of the most attentive and well behaved kids in the audience. Also that they were able to recognize the French horn on sight. I haven't the foggiest why that might be.

 

 

For videos of the Kinderkonzert, check the Facebook page! The lovely mother of Agent M. recorded a couple of the songs, and you can really see how focused the Agents were on the musicians.

 

In Art we've been studying the elements of art. You may recall our project on primary and neutral colors in our last blog post. This time we used the primary colors to make secondary and tertiary colors. The kids don't often get to mix playdough (or in this case, Model Magic), so this was like heaven for them - in the first few seconds, anyway, before they realized how much work mixing colors all the way can be.

 

Over the past few weeks we've cooked some pretty awesome food. You saw our hot cross buns; now behold our pierogies, lasagna rollups, and rice and beans!

 

 

I hope you've enjoyed the blog this week! Updates should come more frequently through the end of school, as we have a lot going on to share. This week we'll be hard at work practicing for Down by the Riverside, our spring music program taking place on 29th of May. Time is a bittersweet thing. On the one hand, there's so much work to be done it'll be hard to fit it in a week. On the other, I can't wait to share the program with all of you! Have a fantastic week, and I'll see you soon!

 

God bless,

Mia

 

On Field Trips, Circus Days, Blood Models, and Everything Between

It has been a crazy few weeks at FMLCS! We've been working really hard and learning a lot...

 

...but also having a lot of fun. On March 26, we went on a field trip to the Portland Children's Museum. The kids had a blast, especially with the fire truck and other play-pretend areas. 

 

Two days later, the LTCC preschoolers were having Stone Soup day and invited the Agents to tag along. We listened to the classic book 'Stone Soup', and then shared a meal made by the kids. The preschool provided the stone soup - complete with actual stone - and the Agents provided the veggie 'corndogs' (as requested by Agent V).

 

 

The following week, the Agents made models of blood using jelly beans, marshmallows, oil, water, and other household items. They found this almost as entertaining as the field trip to the museum.

 

 

 

And the Friday after that, LTCC and FMLCS teamed up on a 'Circus Day'. We had a puppet show...

 

 

Cool circus themed activities...

 

A bouncy house...

 

And balloons and facepainting!

 

Then, on April 5 (the Sabbath after our circus day), we headed up to Freeport to perform in the Sabbath school portion of the 2014 Northern New England Conference Music Clinic.

 

 

The kids did spectacularly, and dozens of people came up to me all throughout the day and well into Sunday to say how impressed they were and that the Agents stole the show!

 This past week felt busy, but was actually pretty quiet in retrospect. We studied primary and neutral colors and used them in a Piet Mondrian-esque painting...

 

 

...and experienced some good natured camaraderie while making sweet potato fries (as requested by Agent M.).

 

This next week will likely be another quiet one as we make sure we have all our work done in anticipation of Spring Break, which I think we're all looking forward to! I hope you've had a beautiful April so far, and are enjoying some nice weather wherever you are - the weather here in Maine has been unexpectedly lovely, and the Agents are getting extra outside time whenever possible. It's definitely about time!

God bless,
Mia