Mud and Snow! - March Family Program

 For March's Family Program we celebrated mud season and cognitive flexibility. We began by sharing our names and something we had noticed in the natural world, including the return of the geese, the muddy roads that then froze and got covered in snow, and the two beavers in Cranberry Meadow. We then read the book Duck! Rabbit! by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Tom Lichtenheld. The book is based on an optical illusion that can either look like a rabbit with two long sideways ears, or a duck with a long bill, depending on how you look at it. We then explored other optical illusions, including a picture that can look like two faces or a vase (or a big rock with water flowing over it, as one participant noticed) and another drawing that can look like a frog or a horse, depending on its orientation. We discussed how we can sometimes get "stuck" in fixed views, thinking that our way of seeing things is the only way, and how valuable it can be to practice seeing things from a variety of perspectives, even if it does not come easily at first. We also played several other games that continued to explore shifting our perspectives and our bodies. We then ate some delicious "mud" chocolate pudding, with accompanying "snow" (coconut), "rocks" (raisins), "dirt clumps" (dates), and some fresh maple sap. We ended with some time tracking and playing in the snow outside.