Seeds Nature Preschool

On Saturday we had a very special Family day and Graduation for the kids. Most of our kids move to kindergarten or 1st grade this week and we invited their families to spend that last day together.

We had an exhibition of their projects from the whole year and a slideshow of the best photos. The kids made nature crowns for their graduation ceremony, wrote letters to each other and put them into personal mailboxes. We sat in a circle for our last assembly together to share something special about every child, talk about our experiences, exchange presents and sing a farewell song together. We shared a lunch together and the kids prepared popsicles for everyone as a dessert too!

We want to thank all our kids and their families for being with us! Words can’t truly express how grateful we are for having all of you, for trusting us and choosing our preschool as a place for your child growth and development!

We are preparing to open a bigger new space soon and planning to have our own kindergarten program and elementary school too, so please stay in touch!

Whitney Goodman Mari Jaime Schmidt Adithya Hemakumar Tatiana Lee Vera Matyushentseva Анастасия Зуева Ivan Shamaev Irina Elinevskaya Evgeny Stupachenko Mithra Kottravel William Goodman Stephanie Tonna Hennessy

Yesterday while sorting our extensive collection of nature treasures our students had collected in the forest, we just got another proof of how BEAUTIFUL our nature is!
We feel so lucky we can share the value of it with our children at such a young age!

Happy Father’s Day to all amazing dads here!

We did something special with our students for their fathers this week. Every kid picked a photo of their daddy and drew their portraits on a tissue paper. Some of the students used a light table or even a window to see the details of the faces better. We also prepared a small questionary about their daddies and put down all the answers the kids gave us about their dads. We hope that every father could feel the love the kids expressed while preparing those small surprises.

Happy Mother’s Day to all moms!

We offered our kids different materials to make their mom’s portraits for Mother’s Day. Their eyes, when they saw their mom’s photos, were sparkling: “It’s my mom! It’s my! Wow! She is so beautiful!” They would carefully choose the colors their mom would like, find a paper with the same color as their skin tone, choose materials for their hair, eyes, lips checking with the photos. They couldn’t wait to give the portraits to their moms!

Last week we celebrated Earth Day with our kids 🌎
Actually every day in our nature preschool is “earth day”
but we decided to spend more time to discuss what we could do to take a better care of our Mother Earth.

We talked about 3R: Reduce⬇️, Reuse🔄, Recycle ♻️ and did a project on recycling old paper we were about to throw. The kids tore it into small pieces, soaked them in water, then blended them into pulp and made new sheets of paper to use in their projects like making paper airplanes and rockets, drawing on it, making cards to their parents, books etc.

They also shared they would like to collect trash 🗑 they had seen in the forest where we go with them everyday. We took trash bags, gloves with us and they did a fantastic job cleaning two different parks on two different days! They would run around together collecting every single piece of trash like they would be on a scavenger hunt!

The kids all agreed they would never throw trash like other people did and would “keep our planet green and clean”. They were so excited to be “on a mission” that they didn’t want to leave before they clean everything! We had to promise we would come back on other day to finish our job.

We couldn’t even express how proud of our kids we are and how much we have been touched by their sincere wish to help our planet! 💚 🌎🙌

Even if we can’t have a real campfire in our forest here in California due to the fire restrictions, we still can practice how to build one!
The kids learned about 8 different types of campfires this week and chose to build a couple of them - a teep*e and a star - to practice together.
They dreamed about camping and cooking over a real fire one day!

EASTER SCAVENGER HUNT
Happy Easter to everyone who celebrated!

We celebrated with our traditional Easter scavenger hunt for the kids: Easter Bunny hid a big egg with a surprise for everyone somewhere near and we had to go for a hunt to find it!
The kids had been looking for eggs with clues everywhere around the school, collected them into a basket and checked them on the list. The last one from 12 eggs led them to the spot with a big egg filled with bunny cookies and Easter gifts for everyone!

FIELD TRIP TO THE FARM
As our kids had been expressing a big interest to animals, we organized a field trip to the farm as a part of their project.

We had a chance to see pigs, cows, sheep and tiny baby lambs, chickens and even a ram! We also visited an organic garden, saw a sundial, historic farm tools, old barns and modern tractors, had a nice walk around the farm together, had a picnic and climbed trees and explore a creek in the forest!

The kids could also get answers to all their questions about farm animals, watched all of them very close, got to know what and how they eat, drink, how they p**p or p*e, how they feed their babies and so much more!

It was an amazing day and they kept talking about it the whole week! We can’t wait to see what can come out of it!

Our kids just LOVE working with clay (so do us!).

The process of working with this natural material supports personalized learning, sensory development, fine motor skills, self esteem, self expression, problem solving skills and can be used as an art therapy too!

Today we combined clay and some leaves from our garden. We plan on using underglaze colors afterwards and fire some of the clay projects too!

FOREST ALPHABET

We noticed earlier that the kids were very much into letters and started to look for them everywhere, showing us “Look, it’s… letter!”
So once we gave them a camera to take pictures earlier this week, we shared this observation and they started to look for letters and found a lot just around us!

It was very interesting to see how they would move the same stick and discover it could be a different letter or even a number.
They found: I, T, Y, 7/L, P/b/6/9.

We decided to print them and continue to look for letters around, so we can make our own alphabet!

Exploring all shades on green on St. Patrick’s Day ☘️

Do you show your kids that green can be sooo different?
You can literally make dozens of green shades: green, moss, lime, olive, turquoise, mint, pistachio...

Our kids were very excited to use pastel, markers, crayons, pencils and especially paints to mix new green shades!