Natural Pleasures

Yesterday, a friend and I walked around Como Lake here in St. Paul, Minnesota. We saw a Great Blue Heron, a common egret, a number of geese and ducks, and also a mama duck with 5 little feather balls of ducklings.

Then, later in the day, while sitting on my back porch, I watched an oriole moving around my yard and then got "buzzed" by a hummingbird checking out the geranium on the porch.

Today I got to go with about 70 K through 4th graders to a park for lunch and games.

It's fun to watch the wild things in their environment!

Enjoying and exploring

I found this cartoon at the blog, LibraryBytes. Somehow, I couldn't resist including it here.

So I have further used my 23 things: I have chatted via Facebook with my son in Greece (soon to be home in Minnesota for 2 weeks!), I have found lesson plans on water usage and the Jordan River in Israel, and I have become wicked good at bilging on Puzzle Pirates. (Okay, maybe a little TOO good at Puzzle Pirates...)

Seriously though, I have gotten more comfortable and more efficient at finding materials than I was before, and I was pretty good to start with. This past week I even found a bilingual (Hebrew-English) picture book about desert animals in the Negev for a first grade unit on, wait for it, desert animals in the Negev. And it's even adorable.

Well, enough self-praise. But I wouldn't have been quite so successful at this without the 23 things on a stick. So now I almost have time to play Puzzle Pirates again!

May Day Madness

Spring is exploding all around me, and I am sitting at my computer. The only thing that makes it even half-way okay is knowing that today I get to read to preschoolers, do recess duty, and pick up my plants from the school plant sale.

But even though I usually don't like spring (damp, etc.), I love the quality of the sunshine and the energy with which people respond to the world outside.

Here's one of my favorite poems about spring:


in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman
whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing
from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it's spring
and the goat-footed
balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee

ee cummings


I hope everyone gets to enjoy some sunshine, and sprinkles, and mud...