Spring is Drawing Nigh

Our class has been on the lookout for a few weeks now, for signs of Spring.  We have all been been delighted to see little green shoots starting to spring up (pun intended) all over our school yard.  The children even spied one brave little dandelion!  They do say, "March comes in like a lion," so I guess that dandelion was doing its part to make the old rhyme true.  : )

I wanted to share a few of my favorite "Spring is Drawing Nigh"

 resources: songs and pieces of music, and books.

A wonderful book and song, The Garden Song by David Mallet

CHORUS:

Inch by inch, row by row

Gonna make this garden grow

All it takes is a rake and a hoe

And a piece of fertile ground

Inch by inch, row by row

Someone bless these seeds I sow

Someone warm them from below

‘Til the rain comes tumbling down 

Our class has been listening to a version sung by Maria Muldaur.  I found it here, if you would like to listen to a sample of it.  I have a very active class, and they quiet down immediately upon hearing it.  We play and sing it during our Circle time as we imagine we are tiny seeds which have been "sleeping" quietly in the cold Winter earth, and are now beginning to send down roots and grow.

There is also a lovely book, Inch by Inch: The Garden Song illustrated by Ora Eitan, which illustrates the lyrics to this song.  My students' favorite picture shows the gardener sliding down a rainbow!  They oohed and aahed the first time they saw it and have continued to do so every time thereafter.

Another Spring musical resource is from Antonio Vivaldi's The Four Seasons.  It is the Violin Concerto in F Major.  (Here is a place where you can listen to it although you'll have to ignore the autumnal images on the video.  Yes, this piece of music traditionally represents Autumn, but when I hear it I envision green lawns dotted with hopping rabbits.  Listen to the piece and hopefully you will hear the "hopping" part of the music.  My students and I listen to this while we sit on our carpeted area and pretend to be rabbits.  We hop during the "hopping" parts of the music, and during the other parts, we wiggle our rabbit noses, eat carrots, parsley, and lettuce, take a quick rabbit nap, and scutter underneath a hedge to get out of the rain.


If, after listening to the "hopping music", you are still feeling rabbit-ish, you might also like Rabbits and Raindrops by Jim Arnosky.  This is a great book with beautiful illustrations that go right along with the Vivaldi rabbit hopping activity.









Tomorrow we are going to begin a Spring planting activity, indoors.  It is still pretty chilly and the school is pretty strict about what we can plant outdoors, so we are going to plant by making terrariums!  Look for more about this soon, and in the meantime, I hope you enjoy Spring spring-ing!