Winter 2024 - Week Six
February 9, 2024 • Vol. 21
Greetings Honeysuckle Families,
What was once a long-shot, probably-not-gonna happen dream is now a reality. We have NYC Parks Department tree guards on all ten of our trees!! This would have otherwise cost thousands of dollars and no doubt the Society’s signs and care for the trees helped inspire our local Assemblyman Harvey Epstein to place the call to the Parks Department after I raised the issue in an Advocacy Meeting last Fall. I spoke to the Parks Department Chief of Staff shortly thereafter and told him about the children’s work adopting the trees and taking care of them. A few weeks later, there was suddenly room in the budget for tree guards and now we actually do in fact have them!! The Garden Committee would like to plan a joint TNS-Star Academy celebration of the guards including highlights of our work with the trees later this year so stay tuned! First let’s recap the week!
On Monday, we started off snack time with some special homemade chocolate chip banana bread and popcorn. We filled out our weather chart and started talking about the moon phases and realized that we didn’t have a crescent moon shape for the evening’s moon. So we got right to work making one. We spent our entire time outside as the weather was lovely and now the kids really want to log in hours outside on their 1000 hours outside worksheet! As the kids were playing, I looked over the fence and realized that new tree guards had been installed on our Third Street trees!
On Tuesday, we were ready to celebrate our tree guards with some hot cocoa, marshmallows, chocolate chip banana bread and donut holes. We started off with some great nature play and jotted down some different leaf shapes in our Nature Journals. Then it was off to the trees to decorate them with yarn. Our first subject was the tree by the Third Street Yard dropoff point which gets a lot of traffic and litter as you can imagine. The kids did a great job wrapping the tree with yarn and weaving it in and out of the guard itself. Then it was time to go upstairs to warm up and finish work on our gnomes.
On Wednesday, we welcomed a special guest-dropin student and continued the celebration with yummy baked goods and hot cocoa. Our newest Society member adopted a 4th Street tree, and when we visited it we realized that the Parks Department had installed guards on the 4th Street trees that day. It was very exciting! Now all 10 trees were accounted for. Next it was time to decorate another tree guard—this time with a lot of special yarn work between the guard and the tree to help discourage dogs from entering.
