March 2025: Exploring New Concepts

**Embracing the the natural world around us to provide children with hands-on, explorative, and relevant learning experiences.**

Mindful Focus: “Mindful March” What to do with your mad.

Explorations: Rocks, Fossils, Weather, & Water

As the Earth continues to revolve and rotate it provides us with new learning opportunities each day. This month we enjoyed looking for signs of spring, making delicious pancakes on cooking and cleaning day, planting flower bulbs and tomato starts, getting to learn about all types of weather (and playing in it!), and participating in activities to help us better understand our elements on Earth.

At SimpleLife, we use the word mindful a lot. Although mindful often is peaceful and calm, we teach the children that we can do all activities with mindfulness. “Be mindful of your surroundings while you run and jump.” “how can we mindfully splatter the paint so it doesn’t get in our hair?” “I can see you have some very big mad right now, how can we mindfully let that out?” Mindfulness isn’t always deep breathing and yoga poses, it can still be loud and messy!

Let’s dive into the month of March at SimpleLife!

- Miss Demi

One of the many things we did in March was explore the changes of spring. The children seemed excited to spot budding flowers, find bugs, and notice new plant growth.

In our school garden, we planted peas, carrots, potatoes, and garlic. We also planted tomatoes to take home using repurposed containers. Gardening provided a sensory experience and an opportunity to explore cause and effect (science) as we cared for living things.

We sang springtime songs like Grassy Grass Grass, Mr. Sun, and Spring is Here, as well as seasonal books and poetry, including Home for a Bunny. These activities encouraged language development and sparked conversations about seasonal changes.

One of the highlights of the month was our Spring Celebration! The children planted irises, created still-life paintings of daffodils in a vase, and did a spring scavenger hunt, using checklists and binoculars to spot signs of spring. So fun! We ended the day with the cutest pet picnic, where children introduced their stuffed animals, shared healthy snacks, and enjoyed time together. This special day was full of fun, creativity, sensory exploration, problem-solving, and most importantly connection with each other!

Spring has been full of hands-on learning and discovery, and we look forward to more nature-inspired activities ahead!

- Miss Lacey

Mindful March:

*What do you think mindfulness means?*

This month at SimpleLife our mindful focus was, in fact, mindfulness. More specifically how to mindfully deal with any and all of our big emotions. When I was younger, that was never something that was taught to me, or even shown to me by example. I was taught and shown that certain emotions were bad, and should be hidden. And that when they weren’t hidden they were destructive - especially anger! I learned to repress it because I didn’t know what to do with it, and I felt huge shame around it thinking I was bad simply for experiencing it. So, each year when Mindful March comes around I make an effort to learn alongside the children about healthy ways to deal with our emotions - especially mad!

Just like happy, sad, silly, and tired; mad is an emotion that everybody experiences - and there is no shame in that. Our emotions are a natural part of our bodies development and defense - we experience them for a reason. Throughout my own time at SimpleLife I’ve been working hard to allow myself to experience my mad rather than shutting it off whenever it came up out of shame and, frankly, fear. I was never truly taught healthy ways to deal with my mad and help it leave my body until I searched for those methods myself. So I am so beyond happy to be able to provide these kids with something I never had - a healthy discussion, free of shame, about how to handle an emotion that can be extremely overwhelming.

During circle times this month we talked about how to recognize the mad feeling within ourselves, and within other people. And we discussed ways that we can all take into practice in order to help our bodies process and move past the mad. As even though it’s a natural and ok emotion, that does not mean it’s fun to experience or feel stuck in. Each of the children slowly gained confidence in sharing moments when they felt mad, and what they did to deal with it. And those that didn’t were able to have a one on one conversation with teacher later in the day or week when relevant. And each and every one of them was able to come up with a healthy way to deal with their mad that followed three questions. 1. Will this method cause you to hurt yourself? 2. Will this method cause you to hurt another person? And 3. Will this method cause you to break or destroy something that is not meant to be broken or destroyed? If the answer to all three of those questions is no then you’ve found a healthy way to get your mad out of your body.

Scribble. Scream (outside or in a pillow). Exercise. Meditate. Ask for help. Drink some water. Whatever the case may be, just remember. Mad is not bad. Mad is allowed and healthy, what matters is how we express it. So, I encourage each of you to show these kids by example - don’t hide your mad from them, instead model healthy ways to feel it.! “I’m starting to feel mad. I’m going to go get a drink and take a breath.” “My body is feeling overwhelmed. I need to sit in a quiet space.” Etc. Tell them what you’re feeling and how you’re going to deal with it, and it opens the pathway for them to feel safe doing the same with you as they learn to recognize these feelings that can be so much for their little bodies. It’s hard, and it’s tricky, it’s scary - especially if, like me, you’ve spent your whole life suppressing it. But it is truly freeing, and healing, to be able to acknowledge that it’s just a natural part of life and watch as they grow to understand every part of themselves.

- Miss Sushi

This month we focused on rocks and fossils. The children had an in-depth circle time where they learned about Geology and how to be a Geologist, or a scientist who studies rocks. We taught them how to observe, predict, and discover. Geologists use many of their senses to learn more about the rocks they discover during their research. Touch, look, smell, and even taste (though we didn’t taste any of the rocks we presented). As they took turns looking at over 30 types of rocks and minerals, the children touched and even smelled them, finding differences and similarities amongst them. They were especially excited about the small fragment of meteorite which was heavier than it looked. After the circle time, we as teachers set up more rocks for discovery downstairs on the exploration table. They used flashlights, magnifying glasses and water to test out different theories about each rock, mineral and fossil. The flashlights helped them discover which rocks were translucent or opaque. The water was used to wipe away any dust or debris and showed how the rocks look more vibrant when they were wet. The children really enjoyed this exploration and even got to make their own fossils out of salt dough, pressing different objects into the dough to create different impressions. And at the end of the week, they each got to take home a real fragment of fossil shared by one of their classmates, it was really special!

- Miss Annie

What an adventure we had during the month of March! We all got to transform into scientists, making predictions and investigating all the different types of weather. Together we learned new words like evaporation and precipitation when creating our water cycles. We also learned about density during our hands on circle time as we made predictions about what would sink and what would float! We even got to engage in some movement, giving each child the opportunity to be their own water droplet being warmed by the sun evaporating us to the clouds. When our clouds were getting heavy we’d drop back down to the ground, raining all the way back into the body of water. This is such a fun way to get the children to understand more difficult concepts! We also learned about water properties, water can change from a liquid, solid and gas!

With the winter season wrapping up, we were really able to see so many different examples of weather. It was the perfect time to get out our magic meteorologists hats and get outside to make some observations to report back to the weather station. We all had a blast working as a team! We discussed the temperature with our thermometer, measured the wind and rain with a windsock and rain gauge then kept all of our information safe with our very own documentation. Our exciting journey through the weather stations ended with an opportunity to test out the winds strength using pinwheels, every kiddo was filled with giggles and smiles as they ran around watching the pinwheels spin! Each child also got to create their own wind chime using recycled materials, this art project allowed each child to express their own creativity through painting and testing those fine motor skills to weave the yarn through each hole. Another fun way to measure the wind! This exploration included so many sensory opportunities, from shaving cream clouds to experimenting with salt, ice and water and thanks to our mud suits we were able to get muddy and messy in the digging area.

- Miss Mallorie