ACADEMIC SPOTLIGHT

7-8s Tree Festival

On Friday, January 23, the 7-8s held their very first Tree Festival! The students showed their understanding of the critical role trees play in our lives by bringing in a broad range of tree products.  One student even suggested bringing in a box of air for our celebration.

The Tree Museum was an eclectic collection of original art, and useful and beautiful objects.  Children brought in wooden sculptures, woven baskets and clothing, wooden household items and 7-8s paper and wooden creations.  During our tree festivities, children reused tree products such as boxes, leaves, pine cones, and paper to craft new additions for our Tree Museum.  Two popular activities were making paper parachutes and butterfly wings.

On the rug, we had an assortment of tree games and an open tree library.  Our library consisted of tree-themed books from our 7-8s and MCS libraries, as well as titles brought in from home.  A few titles from our tree library are:  "The Great Kapok Tree" by Lynne Cherry, "Aani and the Tree Huggers" by Jeannine Atkins, and "Treehouses of the World" by Pete Nelson.  Several tree games were brought in from home.  During our festival, children played Jenga, experimented with some wooden musical instruments and a flip flop ladder toy, and played an original card game with individual paper cards artfully crafted by a 7-8s student. 

The feasting part of our tree festival was marked by expansive thoughtfulness.  Many students made tree fruit salad with Judy, our science specialist.  The stars of our salad were the spiral-cut, cored, and peeled apples that we spun out on a special apple-cutting machine. A couple of students worked hard at cracking open and husking a whole coconut (with the help of Leo and his drill).    Our feast foods were supplemented with homemade “Tree Cake,” banana bread, dried mango, chocolate, and olive oil with bread.  A full range of tree beverages complimented our tree foods.  We had root beer, birch beer, pomegranate tea, orange juice—freshly squeezed by our 7-8s juicers—fruit punch and hot chocolate.  At the end of our feast, our tree-ologists were so full of tree foods that they barely had room for their Friday lunches.

Thanks to parent support, the children’s ingenuity and enthusiasm, our tree festival was a huge success.  Although we had planned to celebrate for about one hour, our festivities rolled on for over two hours!  We will continue to appreciate and think about trees over the next two weeks as we create Save-A-Tree bags and enjoy more spiral-cut apples.