A New Medium for Turtle Artists

We introduced a new art medium today: Oil Pastels! Oil pastels can be be beautiful for blending colors, as well as for making vibrant colors. Another advantage to oil pastels is their small size, which encourages a tripod grasp on the pastel, an important pre-writing skill.

Other choices included:

Missy had lots of new games for use today:

Musical Chairs

The Chicken Dance

Twister

Soccer with goalies

"We Will, We Will ROCK YOU!" (and clap in patterns!)

At the logs, we discovered that we have grown bigger and stronger and some things that we couldn't do before we can now do!

While at the logs, we smelled smoke. We looked around the horizon, and noticed that there was smoke coming from one chimney. We went to investigate, and found several teachers working in the Short Stable, with a beautiful fire in the fire place!

Fran reading "Snowballs" by Lois Ehlert

Mystery Lovers

Well, it turns out that the Turtles love a good mystery! This shouldn't be surprising, given how many mysteries we have uncovered this year, but being blinded by my teacher glasses, I missed that fact that the Turtles are not just intrigued by individual mysteries, but also, by the idea of mysteries. And so we have started putting together our own book, Investigating Mystery. With yesterday's Mystery of the Scarecrows, they have started asking questions as they think about the mysteries.

As any good mystery writer could tell you, it turns out that clues show up over time, and sometimes when you think that the mystery has gone cold, that is just exactly when you get your best clues!

And so today, we spied another clue from our playground: more cones! In our boots and raincoats, we set out to search out the cones. We found several around the cemetery, and as we were walking, we saw many Middle Schoolers walking to Meeting for Worship. One child theorized that the cones were lining the path for the big kids.
Then we found something very unusual: a purple cone! The children had theories on why it was purple, including a clear reference to all the color mixing experimentation we have been doing: "It is purple because somebody wanted to mix blue and red!"

We also found another  set of unusual cones: "They have stripes because its telling people that there is something dangerous there." The children already have many theories about the cones, drawing on their previous experiences, and it is fascinating to hear how they are connecting them to this current mystery.

We had lots of other things going on today, including easel painting

with a lesson on being the boss of your brush,

a fancy restaurant

complete with waiters,

a car rescue mission when they got stuck in the tube,

a branch collecting mission to help Carol and the Little Frogs build their stick house.