What a wild week is has been!  We’ve finished Z week in our alphabet curriculum and are not spending a couple of weeks reviewing the ABCs in general.  It’s so much fun to revisit the letters we’ve already explored!

We kicked off ABC week by studying one of our favorite books:  Chicka Chicka Boom Boom!  This delightful rhyming story tells the tale of some mischievous lower-case letters that race one another to the top of a coconut tree, only to discover that there are way too many of them to fit!  When the coconut tree comes crashing down, the capital-letter Mamas and Papas come running to rescue their bumped and bruised babies.  We recreated our own Chicka Trees here at school!  Each child painted his or her forearm brown and hand green.  Next, the children gently pressed their arms onto a piece of paper.  Once their hands were clean, they used letter stickers to adorn their beautiful and unique trees!

Tuesday’s adventure brought another visit from the famed pirate Capt. Jack Sparrow!  Capt. Sparrow visited us during X week, and he was back again to leave letters, clues, and a map around the classroom.  Working together, we found all of his clues, assembled them in alphabetical order, then found his buried treasure: golden chocolate coins!  We also had several small group projects this week, each one geared to a specific interest and challenge level.  While one group used pipe cleaners to make their own letters, another played Letter Memory, while another still sorted through Alpha-Bits cereal to organize the letters!

It was a crazy week in terms of staff here at HCS.  We were so sad to have our very last music class with Jessica, Zoe’s mom.  She’s filled our classroom (and our hearts!) with such wonderful songs that we sing them all week  long!  With Jessica’s expertise and passion, the Tugboats were able to explore new musical instruments, practice replicating and creating their own beats and rhythms, and sang to their hearts’ content.  We will miss our weekly class with Jessica!  The Tugboats also welcomed a new substitute here to HCS:  Paula!  While Peter is away for a few days around the weekend, Paula has joined us for some fun in the sun.  Having just returned from a tour of the world as an educator with Semester at Sea, Paula has more stories and adventures than anyone I know!  She brought in her Spinning Diablo and demonstrated for the kiddos how she uses two sticks and a string to spin the diablo very fast, then launches it high up in the sky.  She launched the diablo higher than the YMCA this morning!  After all that excitement and a good nap, we spent the afternoon preparing for our new teacher, Zahirah, who joins us next Monday.  Things are really shaking up around here!

How is it possible that we’ve reached the end of our alphabet curriculum?!  It seems not so long ago that we were exploring apples, bouncing balls, and conducting celery experiments.  While it feels like time has flown, quite a lot has happened between A week and our current Z week.  We’ve been making zebra Zs and studying zeros with the 13 families who have joined us in just a few short months, doubling the size of our community!  As our enrollment has increased, so too have our energy and volume levels, which could be seen at our Spring Party this Thursday.  With 22 of our 26 students in attendance, along with their families, we enjoyed delicious breakfast foods, read a silly spring time story, and hunted for eggs (labeled with each child’s pattern, of course!) out in the Bremen St. Park.  The amazing and talented Edson photographed the event, and the beautiful photographs are coming soon!

During project time this week, we alternated between celebrating spring and exploring our seldom-used letter of the week.  We talked a lot about zoo animals and imagined what sort of fantastical creatures we would create if we could combine different animals.  We rolled marbles in black paint, then rolled them across white paper to make our Zs look like zebras.  We also talked about the number zero, what it means and how different its value is from other numbers.

Our most exciting project of the week was contributed by our parent helper on Thursday, Andrew.  Andrew shared his love of mechanics and motorcycles with the Tugboats by designing a lesson on electricity!  He brought a motorcycle battery, wires, and some moto-parts and began the project by explaining that while the materials he brought for us were safe, the children should never  touch these items without a parent if they should happen upon them outside of school.  He cut the plastic casing to show us the copper wires inside, twisted them together, then touched to ends together to make a bulb light up!  Each child took a turn (with Andrew’s help) turning the light on.  Once we had all taken a turn, Andrew brought out an old car horn!  He held it to his stomach to muffle the sound and each child got to make the horn go off.  Many of them noticed that the horn didn’t sound quite like the horns in their own cars.  I hope the neighbors weren’t alarmed!