March 2021

Message From Our Teachers

During the month of Februrary Queen’s Park Preschool was filled with extra love as we celebrated Valentines Day, friendship, family and kindness together. Highlights of the month included heart shapes, the colour red and searching for treasure, heart treasure that is. Together we have been working on our art show art projects for our upcoming art exhibit called Lines and Dots. The art show will feature wire sculpture, abstract paintings and self portraits! Getting up close and personal with our guineau pig Windy offered some of us a way to practice gentleness and loving care. Bringing out our big blue mat to jump, bounce, roll and dance was so much fun! We love our big blue mat as it offers us a chance to use our large muscles and really use our leg strength and core. This month we baked together making carrot cake and banana muffins. We also helped make jello together. Delicious fun! We hope you had an amazing month of February! We know we sure did!

 

Important Dates

• The General Meeting originally scheduled for March 2nd has been postponed to April 6th.
• Spring break is from Monday March 15th to Friday March 26th. 

Spring

The first day of spring is on the way arriving on Saturday March 20th. We may not be travelling too far this year, but there are so many lovely parks and spots to get some fresh air locally in New Westminster. Check out this list put together by Tourism New Westminster, how many places on this list have you visited?

https://tourismnewwestminster.com/business-types/parks/

While exploring some of these local parks, you may come across some charming Mason Bee houses. You can learn more about this program and how it supports these important pollinators on the City of New Westminster’s website here: 

https://www.newwestcity.ca/2021/02/26/mason-bee-house-program.php

10 Fun facts about mason bees:

• Mason bees are solitary, which means they don’t live in colonies.
• They’re commonly called masons because they use mud and other materials associated with masonry to build their homes.
• They don’t have workers or queens.
• Mason bees hibernate in winter and emerge in spring.
• Mason bees don’t produce honey, and focus more on collecting pollen for their brood than nectar. This makes them excellent pollinators.
• When a mason bee forages, they roll in pollen to collect as much as possible.
• They’re some of the busiest bees you can find, visiting almost 2,000 flowers in one single day.
• Mason bees are not aggressive. The females can sting but it’s unlikely that they’ll attack humans.
• They build their nests in existing holes, cracks, crevices, tunnels or other gaps in walls.
• Mason bees don’t live in colonies but they do prefer to nest within close proximity of each other

Credit to: https://beehivehero.com/mason-bees/

Pollinator Activities

Pollinators play an important role in our everyday lives and the variety of foods on our tables. Try some pollinator themed activities with your little one from the Science World resources page:

https://www.scienceworld.ca/resource/pollinators/

 

A&B
qppseditor@gmail.com