Fall 2023 - Week Thirteen

December 9, 2023  •  Vol. 13

As you may have heard we had a great victory this week! I could not believe my own eyes on Tuesday afternoon when I saw that the New York City Parks Department had installed a genuine tree guard around our newest 4th Street tree!! I am so happy that we are on their radar, due in no small part to the work of our Honeysuckle kids!! First things first, though, let’s recap the week.

On Monday, the children were very excited when I brought out some small plastic toy animals and immediately started incorporating them into our garden habitat. This month’s focus is on Ecosystems and we have been talking about how the animals, the plants, trees, and the soil are all interconnected as a nature community. We planted some more bulbs, added leaf mulch to the trees and then made animal footprints in clay and on paper.

On Tuesday, we celebrated our new tree guard with some brownies during snack time. Then we got to work giving our trees some wood mulch on top of the leaves as the weather is getting colder. One of our neighbors stopped to thank the children for their work taking care of the trees, and I mentioned to him that through their work adopting these trees they have helped encourage the city to provide us with a real tree guard! When we arrived at our new tree guard, we spent a lot of time decorating it with ribbons, string and pipe cleaners.

On Wednesday, we had a chillier afternoon and I was so proud of how the children wore their winter gear without much fuss. We started our afternoon with more celebratory brownies, a lot of creative play and then visited some more trees to mulch them. We came inside to briefly warm up and wash our hands. Then we returned to the garden for a game of animal charades which turned into a high energy game of chase as the sun set.