Happy Spring Everyone! ❀
We’ve been moving steadily along through our school year here at Greene Towne. Last month to kick off the start of the spring season students discussed Ramadan, Eid al-Fitr, St. Patrick’s day, Passover, and more. We continued our conversations from the fall on indigenous communities around the world, specifically linking our studies on communities in North America and talking about folklore and legends on a more global scale. Children explored books from our Diversity Library collection, and we discussed how the Choctaw tribe, despite just going through their own hardships, showed care and community to the people of Ireland during the Great Famine. Students also observed examples of Islamic art and Celtic art, taking note of the geometrical patterns, motifs, and the cultural significance behind these works. To reflect these themes students were invited to decorate fanous (lanterns), stars, and shamrocks inspired by the decorative patterns and intricate illustrations. This created a colorful Ramadan display for our first floor lobby along with a communal folklore inspired display for the school’s second floor hallway featuring a transforming faerie queen, a large Sessile Oak (the national tree of Ireland), and an Irish hare (often associated with faerie folk in legend). Themes of transformation and transition loom large in folklore the world over and serve as a means for discussing the transition of seasons, especially the coming of spring. Tà an tEarrach linn! It’s Spring!
And now spring is in full swing! All around Philadelphia and beyond blossoms have been blooming and decorating our sidewalks in shades of pink. To celebrate the season and honor Earth Day students worked together to create a recycled display, emphasizing the importance of collaboration, community, and repurposing the resources we already have at hand. Some aspects of this project come from past projects that have been reused and repurposed while others were made by some Lower Elementary students and our Kindergartners in their World Around Us classes. We discussed Hanami 花見, the custom of flower viewing in Japan, and places where cherry blossom festivals are held worldwide such as the one in Fairmount Park at Shofuso. Kindergartners explored books and pictures of sakura and printed fabric with the same motif and used that as inspiration for their own blossoms, piecing them together from recycled materials. They also used recycled scraps of magazines and past projects to collage the bark of the sakura tree. Children then worked together as a group to create a haiku. We discussed the structure of these poems (5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables) and together the students came up with multiple possible choices to put into our haiku template. Out of the many word associations students came up with these led to our eventual completed haiku:
“Spring is so cheer-ful
cherry blossoms are bloom-ing
earth al-ways grow-ing”
Moving forward through April into May we will be working towards K graduation and celebrating our 2025-2026 school year!
