Hands that care to touch and feel are hands that see the beauty just as we do. The more importantly, we begin to interact with its offerings. Nature provokes us into thought, action, and formulating our own ideas. When we are involved in experiences with nature, we are absorbed and completely attentive to what is at hand. ![]() To explore our natural environments, we add tools to enhance explorations, such as shovels, magnifying glasses, pencil and paper, cameras, and so on. We understand some of our growing plants, after we transfer its seedlings to our front yard, our peas take a few more weeks to mature. Working carefully with a pair of scissors we snip the pods when they are still in a uniform green. The next step is to bring them into our group discussion and lunch table to build-up our awareness on the concept of ecosystems. Nature also provides us with a sense of calm and visual images of beauty. We become observant and use our senses, such as: listening to leaves rustling in the wind, looking at spiders' precise silver woven webs, or hearing the singing of birds. Even though open spaces in nature invite us for wonderful spurts of running, jumping, and climbing. they also invite us to slow down. To further deepen our emerging understanding on what is an ecosystem all about? we choose to bring some European night crawlers into our environment. For we learn that everything is connected, from birds, insects, fish, dirt, and trees to our food and ourselves. However, to really understand how interconnected all life forms in an ecosystem are, it helps to experience firsthand, inside and outside. By observing closely, we let our brains capture and process what we have observed and further think in our heads. Providing ourselves with opportunities to come close and care for nature supports a sense of respecting nature and developing empathy. These two elements are indeed crucial in walking hand-in-hand with our interests to develop a greater respect and care toward self and others. Our minds are full with respective questions during this vermicomposting process such as ...
![]() Working with tweezers, as our apparatus, certainly helps us to hold the bodies of the European night crawlers gently while controlling our firmness. We need to carefully transfer them into our piles of shredded and dampened newspaper strips. Another idea to facilitate our observation is to include a microscopic viewing tool to enhance our discovery. For instance, we discover a lifeless bug in our garden and we are uncertain whether it's a mosquito or a bee since it's super tiny. Connecting our microscope to a laptop enables us to work with our own discovery! We figure little by little how the distinct pattern of yellow and black stripes on the body confirms that it's a bee! The interesting part of our wondering is when friends are being interested in putting down our thoughts onto a literacy learning experience. To get our thinking more about how energy works in ecosystems, we journalize plants, trees, animals, and people we interact with during our encounters. By penning our encounters onto our journals, we may even learn more about the interconnectedness. We sometimes even ask ourselves some imaginary situations to make connections to our questions take place in our everyday moments. For example, what do you think we should do to care for the bees? The baby and the daddy are walking together in the forest - Nora. A rock is moving ... a bee ... this is a moving flower - Felix. Some of our preliminary journey of conversation and feelings bring our thoughts closer to some empathic actions. We are thinking of small little things we can work on together to further develop our caring hearts. Suggestions from our caring hearts arrive into our planning for the following weeks. We propose to give free lemonade drinks to people who walk by on our sidewalk or even bring it to the homeless people some of our pre-loved items which are useful to them. Since our love for cooking and baking is growing stronger, perhaps we may include some food to share with others, too. Till our thoughts come into realization, we pause a while to celebrate Lukah's 5th birthday. Hip, hip, horray, and Happy birthday, Lukah! May your heart is full with love and joy always! During this celebration we too take an opportunity to learn the significance of sportsmanship through a musical chair game. We take turns to support others who are keep going and celebrate the fun at the end. Kindest,
Children & Friends.
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