These first few weeks have started off so sweetly. It is amazing to see how much our "old school" kids have grown over the summer, and the many things they want to try out. The new children have brought new ideas and excitement to our play and have adjusted so well. For older children, hearing the seasonal stories again makes their eyes light up, and for the new children, they love the novelty of a "puppet story" and acting it out if we get the chance. 

These new interactions are so vital to all children. It takes time to learn the many idiosyncrasies of one another and how to read one another's body language. They are social scientists! They will try out on one another all the tools they carry in their human dna: kindness, pleasing, cuddling, but also the negative ones too: bragging, grabbing, crying, just being louder...and that's okay! This is the time to learn these things, and there is no other way to do it than to be given time, space and patience. And it is so sweet when they begin to realize that they ARE making connections with one another, their friends DO love them. 

We started our seasonal circle time with farmer and garden verses, singing "Oats, peas, beans, and barley grow" and other garden songs. Now our farmer visits an orchard and we all gather apples to put into our pony cart and make applesauce. 

The apples are ripe, the apples are red
They hang so high above my head,
Leave them alone til' windy weather, 
Whoooosh! They'll all come tumbling down together

I love this time of year, even with the bugs, humidity, heat and the tired looking plants. In the nursery, it is a time of new beginnings with so much to look forward to. Already I feel we have settled in and I have so many ideas for our year together. I told the children the other day that our blessing has all the things I look forward to:

For the golden corn and the apples on the tree
For the golden butter and the honey from the bee
For fruits and nuts and berries we gather on our way
We thank you for the food we eat, we thank you everyday. 

Blessings on our food, our families, and our friends!

is We have been in that time of year where everything is shifting. I am filling out kindergarten recommendations for children who are graduating and heading off, welcoming families who will join us in August, and figuring out what I want to bring into our play space for next year. How can I meet the needs of these children and also create space for parents to meet and mingle and build their own community within Appleseeds? 

As I delve into this space of the year, I think about the children's play. Some of the forms for other schools where children will be going have asked questions such as, "What are this child's academic strengths?" Even for play based private schools I have seen this question. I hear the question as well from parents. How does Appleseeds prepare the child academically for Kindergarten? 

The question used to be absurd. No child would be expected to have academic skills before entering Kindergarten! Kindergarten was where you would go to get ready for first grade, and THEN you would begin the academic skills. And I find too, particularly with the attitude of Americans,  is that play is a nice, secret way to get academic skills into your child. "Oh wow, Bobby! Look at all those sticks you've gathered for your fort! Let's count how many! One, two..." and in the process, take the child out of their sacred moment of play in order to learn to count. 

​

The adjustment to kindergarten is rarely smooth sailing, even among parents who send their children to a place more resembling a kindergarten. It is a longer day, and there are more children in a new space. There is always a transition period. But the skills learned here require the time spent on them and not a moment less. It is much harder to allow children to engage in all the ups and downs of socialization: turn taking, idea making and sharing, give and take. These are nuanced skills that must be upheld. In addition, to allow a child to engage deeply in imaginative play is to build what neuroscientists like to call "a playful mind" or flexibility in thought. This helps creates pathways for later abstract, problem solving and mathematical thinking. We know this, science knows this, and yet we as adults, often try to rush this process by injecting our own knowledge into the child's play. It's so difficult sometimes to just sit back and let play be play. 

By the time most children leave Appleseeds, I want them to have played and played and begin to yearn for something more challenging. Then we know it's time to move on to Kindergarten. They've been fully fed with rich play experiences and they are ready for what is next. Of course they will still build on their experiences here, but the play is what prepared them for the next step.

This winter has brought us some snow and cold to experience in our outdoor play times. We have had crunchy, snowy forest walks and enjoyed finding ice wherever it may be. The children had a HUGE ice cube to hammer when their sandbox pump froze. Later, the melted snow gave us so much mud to use for "cooking" and "baking". 

When it has been cold and windy, we've created a hay bale house to stay warm or eat lunch in while we hear a story.

Now that the snow is no longer with us, our sleds have been used inside to work our muscles pulling our friends around the wood floor. 

I had never thought I would say this, but I've been grateful for the abundance of concrete in the play area. We have been able to add all manner of riding toys that each work the body in a different way. We have three-wheelers, scooters, sit-down rollers that you pull yourself along using your legs, tricycles, a wagon, cars, and now a pedal-less bike. The latest endeavor by the children is to create ramps and to ride the different vehicles up and over the ramp. These ramps, being made by the kids, need to be frequently adjusted and they have to work to align the wheels up with the edges. Or, they use the slide as a ramp for the two wheeled bike. This type of play, though it has it's risks, aligns the brain with the body to carefully learn about the necessary movements and muscles required to do such tasks. I feel that it is my job as a child carer, to protect this time for their brain development. 

I've been thinking lately about the children's relationships to their peers and how necessary it is that we allow them this time to work through difficulties with one another. One of my goals is to give them the overall sense that the world is good, and that their peers are good as well. This is difficult to obtain if we push a child through a day of worksheets and "stations". I think about how some children, when they get hurt, really are not interested in attention or comfort from myself, but reach out to hold tightly to one of their friends. I've watched these young children hold tightly to a crying friend, letting that child really pour out their tears, not letting go until they feel better. I think it's crucial that sometimes I allow the children to take over the comforting of their friends. I want their future selves to have a sense of brother and sisterhood with one another. 

Now that the wisteria and poison ivy has officially died back in the forest, we've been able to go on daily forest hikes. We have three different areas, and because they are each so fun, we can only pull off one area a day. So we go either to Fairy Glen, which has a deep dry stream bed to slide down, climb up, and tons of vines to climb and swing on. Then there's Merry Meadow, which has a fort we have built, some fairy homes, and a "fishing hole", then from there, if you cross Sticky Street, you wind up in our new favorite, Loggy Bottom. This is full of fallen trees and logs, which the children love to crawl across. Or a big fallen root mound, which is fun to climb up. 

We have seen so many transformations in the children from our hikes in the forest. The amount of effort they must put into these hikes truly builds their strength and stamina. But aside from the physical growth, there is tremendous emotional and social growth. We listened the other day as one child worked through her limits and what she believed she could do. "I really want to do what I just saw my friend do, but I'm still very scared. I am trying to go as far as I can. No, I don't think I can do it today, but that's okay, I want to try again next time and maybe I can watch my friend do it again so that I know how she did it". There is very little coaching that we are needing to do right now because the children themselves are pushing themselves. They have such deep satisfaction when they have done something new that they couldn't do before, and even when they decide today is not the day, what a tremendous psychological step they have made to know they can try again. 

After our hikes, the children love the change of pace coming back to the smaller space of our playground, though their energy really isn't lower. Instead, they get reactivated to climb the hay bales and test their new skills by jumping off into a soft hay pile over and over. While this is joyful movement at it's best, it's also the child's way of waking up their body and brain in a vestibular sense. They are getting used to their body in space, feeling the senses that come with it--a drop off, a landing, the courage to step out, the energy required to climb to the top again. I would say that with the lowering temperatures, the children's activities outside have only increased! 

Another goal that the children have been working on is how to make water flow up. They sometimes let it go for awhile and then come back to their experiments. They usually try to get just the right gutters or pipes and to pump the water as fast as they can. Sometimes they add sand to the gutter to see if that will help. I do not explain or interfere, as I think this sort of experimentation is the human brain working at it's finest and the interaction with one's peers, rather than having my own interjections, is what will help these kids learn to work together. 

For our inside mornings, the children have been helping to mix the bread before we leave it to rise. For many, this has been a new sensorial experience or sticking ones hands into the goo and using some strength to begin to get the flour and water stirred together. It makes our morning so pleasant to smell the rising dough, even before it's been baked. And now the children also come in and right away are able to settle in to play. Some build forts, some make little stories of their choosing, some build cities with blocks. Sometimes I am asked whether these children are prepared for later academic work. The thought is that academic work is more "advanced work". I would argue that reading, writing, and math are actually the easy part. The more difficult part is the preparation of the brain, the body, the social interactions, and the energy required to work ones mind and body later. But play does all of this in the child. Studies are finding and I have seen that the academic work comes much more easily if the child has had a thorough play experience. This is the work of the child.

The past two weeks have been centered around preparing for our first celebration of the year, our Apple Harvest Celebration. The children used our apple peeler and corer to spin apples into spirals, then chop them to put into our pot to cook for apple sauce. After cooking the apples until they were soft, the children helped mill them with our hand cranked food mill. After our delicious cider pressing last weekend, we had lots of apple mash left over and so we have been milling and milling it into apple sauce. On Thursday, we were able to enjoy some warm applesauce with our homemade bread for snack. Many more jars of the sauce is in the freezer, waiting to be served throughout the year. 

The construction behind our playground has been quite loud, but it has inspired the children in their play, as well as being exciting to watch. It has provided an interesting backdrop to our mornings outdoors. Lately, some of the themes that the children have been playing with is fort making under the picnic table or the climbing dome, Paw Patrol rescue pets, and also some individual and duet performances on a stage the children built with the blocks. Many times in the last week the whole group of kids has played together on a shared theme one of them thought up, then they would drift into smaller groups and then drift back again into a whole group. It is exciting to watch them as they think up new ideas, try them out with friends, think of something new, rest, then come back to an earlier game. This is what I want to protect in the children; this ability and time to let play unfold without too much input and shaping by adults. Working together and also finding time alone, these moments are crucial to the brain development and social development of the child. This is the brain at play, which will be needed later in life to solve more abstract problems. 

The children have been settling into the new school year and have been finding new games to play with one another that they love coming back to. Recently a popular scenario was the fire truck and the children enjoyed dragging chairs into a row, and much care was taken to put on their fire hats (silks wrapped around their heads), and fasten their seat belts (crocheted ropes). In fact, in games like this, children often enjoy putting far more energy into setting up the scenario than in actually acting out the scenario. So the enjoyment they get is in setting up the "fire truck", dressing themselves up, arranging "hoses", than in getting out and putting out "fires". But really it's this act of imagining possibilities together that is so beneficial to the burgeoning social being. 

The children have been helping with changing our garden over to fall plantings. The tomatoes have come down and have been replaced with arugula, beet and tatsoi seeds. They helped strip the basil plants and shell our last remaining pole beans. Some kale, radishes and more carrots have been planted, and a few carrots harvested as well! 

Our morning verse is a verse that we repeat all year and the children have learned it very well by now. Perhaps you can see if they can show it to you. This one is said and not sung:

Good morning dear Earth
Good morning dear sun.
Good morning dear stones, 
and flowers, every one. 
Good morning dear beasts, 
and the birds in the trees, 
Good morning to you, 
And good morning to me!

We've been settling into our new year with new friends and new activities. On Thursday, the weather was so pleasant and the children were so engaged that we stayed out all day long. These first few weeks are focused around getting familiar with how we do things at school and our routine, as well as just getting to know one another. Our crafts are limited to perhaps some drawing or playdough, and of course our bread making. Children are learning our snack and lunch blessing, as well as our seasonal circle which gets added to bit by bit. Our stories even repeat themselves as children soak them in day after day. The story for the past two days was "Over In The Meadow". It's a simple story sung to the traditional "Over In The Meadow" song, and basically being a comforting story of animals with their mothers and a sense of "all is well". By repeating the story day after day, the children then like to make the story their own during playtime, and thus it can become a therapeutic activity for themselves whenever they need it. 

Our Late Summer/Autumn Mealtime Blessing

For the golden corn and the apples on the trees
For the golden butter and the honey from the bees
For fruits and nuts and berries we gather on the way 
We thank you for the food we eat, we thank you everyday.

Blessings on our food, our families, and our friends
​

We've been starting some of our late summer work in the garden. We pulled out our exhausted bush beans and the children pulled the beans off of the vines, and shelled the dry ones to reveal the beans inside. In their place we planted some kale and carrots. We were also lucky enough to harvest some nice big carrots. We washed them in the pump, peeled and chopped them, and had them with our snack on Wednesday. The carrot tops were fed to the guinea pigs. People sometimes ask, "Do you teach them about photosynthesis or have a curriculum around your plants?" I don't. We plant, we water, and if we're lucky, we harvest and eat. There is plenty of time in human lives for learning about botany, but now is the time to just wonder in it. 

Our circle time is generally done inside after we have come in from our snack and playtime outside. We are doing a circle about a farmer who "rose at the break of the day, he got on his horse and he galloped away, galloped away..." He finds himself in an orchard and so we pick apples, put them into a pony cart and hitch up the ponies, eventually arriving home to polish our apples and make apple sauce. This circle will continue pretty much until our Apple Harvest Celebration in September, and afterwards we will make applesauce from our apple remains after cider making. 

We've had a very warm winter, though it was nice to have a short taste of snow this winter. Our outdoor time has still been filled with turning on the hose, taking off jackets, and changes of clothes. One thing that the children have absolutely loved has been learning to do "under dogs" on the big swing, and pulling and pushing one another in the wagons. While of course it is the adult who is the go-to swing pusher, I like encouraging kids to ask their friends to push them instead. This may seem like laziness on the adult's part, but there are so many more benefits to children helping other children. The four year olds are proud of their unique ability to do an "under dog", and the younger ones just get a huge thrill each time a big friend does this for them. This encourages the older child to do it some more, and to get gratification from their hard work. There have certainly been some bumps as children learn that they must back up as a swing comes back towards them, but their growing delight in helping one another and learning to trust their peers is so much longer lasting than any bump. 

The ground has stayed soft enough to continue to dig into it, and so water is hauled all around the play area, from sand box to mud kitchen, to experiment with different concoctions. While the poison ivy is away, we are also continuing our hikes as best we can. Picking vinca from the forest and using it to decorate mud cakes has been a favorite activity, as is nibbling some of the bitter greens and onion grass in the garden. It's even been warm enough to bring out the guinea pigs. Franny shuffled back up the rainbow bridge at the end of February, but she has a little spot beneath some parsley in our garden, and the other girls are enjoying having more clover to nibble all to themselves. 

I like to say that February was a Valentine's month, as we spent the second half of January and the first two weeks of February actually making the Valentine's, and we weren't able to finish and pass them all out until the week after February 14th! Nevertheless, it was such fun to craft these Valentines together, and really, what else are you going to do in February? The children loved passing out their cards, and I loved thinking up different card ideas. 

We've also added a few more story props and these children are always sharing a little story with one another. 

We had a lovely Advent season in Appleseeds this year. The children added a small something to our Advent wreath each day, and put stars up on our winter scene. For the first week of Advent, each day at snack one child would pick an item representing the mineral world to place on the wreath. Some children even brought in a favorite stone from home, and that went on the wreath as well. During the second week, items from the plant world were chosen; a nut, some wheat, some holly, and a pinecone were added on day by day. Because the third week was our last, we added both human and animal figures. It was a crowded wreath, but lovely all the same. Our story during Advent was called "The Star Dipper", and is about a girl who goes into the woods to fetch some water from the stream for her ill mother. On her way home, she meets animals and people who need water and each time she gives them a drink, her dipper turns from first tin to bronze, then silver, then gold, and then finally upon giving her mother a drink, it floats up and becomes the Big Dipper in the sky, as a reminder to everyone to be kind to those we meet and willing to offer help and care. If you are able to during these cool, clear nights, point out the big dipper to your children. 

We kept our days and activities simple to help create a place of calm anticipation during the holiday season. The children created a small winter painting day by day, doing a small part of it each day until it was complete. Their second project was a wool felted ornament. They felted wool around a styrofoam ball, and then, inspired by our razzle dazzle pumpkins a couple months ago, we stuck pins and sequins into the ball. The children love using the pins to stick through the tiny sequin hole, and they make a satisfying crunching noise when you push them into the styrofoam. We may see some razzle dazzle Easter eggs later on....

Actively editing our activities during this holiday season has helped me to consider what I hope to create for our New Year. The truth is that the busy holiday season is really not THAT much busier than any other time of year in our country. As adults, we have to very carefully edit our time and actively choose to slow ourselves down. Children can help to be our guides in that, as long as we don't make the assumption that they must be entertained. It is enough to simply allow them to BE in the outdoors and in their play, and its a soothing reprieve from the world when we allow our adult selves to just BE with them. I am so grateful to have the privilege of just being with these children. 

We have been celebrating our way through Autumn and enjoying all the beauty it offers us outdoors. On our forest hikes, we've loved watching the leaves fall all around us, or shake a little tree and watch the leaves all rain down. Our chilly mornings mean that we're starting inside now and going out once the sun is shining a little warmer outside. For the harvest walk, children decorated their crowns with sequins and leaves, and painted their capes with autumn hued watercolors. After Halloween, the children enjoyed decorating pumpkins with pins, beads, and sequins. Later in the month, lanterns were prepared for our (very windy) lantern walk. 

The children have gotten acquainted with our woodland hikes at this point. The constant stepping over and under and avoiding thorns or holes has given way to more familiarity and ease on our walks. New nooks and vines have been discovered and the children are often eager to get to their favorite places and sad when it's time to return. We'll continue these walks during December. They provide a soothing antidote to the rush and excitement of the season. In our nursery, Advent is observed not so much in an overt Christian way, but in a way that is meant to simply be a quieter and reflective observation, taking cues from the darker days and what nature is offering to us.