“We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

WHAT’S GOOD

🚲 Pedal Pals is Back at Charis Park This Spring!

We're thrilled to welcome Pedal Pals Bike Club back to Charis Park for another season! Starting Monday, March 30th, kids ages 3–6 can join a weekly bike class right here on campus— Mondays from 4:00–4:30pm through May 18th.

Pedal Pals meets kids where they are, using balance and pedal bikes to build skills through playful games and obstacle courses. Bikes and equipment are provided—just bring a helmet!

Classes are open to the public. Register here—spots are limited and a minimum of 5 riders is needed to hold the class, so sign up soon!

What The Oak Trees Know

Linda Charlton, Sprouts School Director

Last Friday afternoon I was on the little shaded playground outside the Pre-Primary classroom with a cadre of kids. We were playing with acorns and watching the squirrels chase each other with acorns in their mouths when one fell straight out of the sky and bonked me on the head—which the kids thought was pretty funny.

Truthfully, I’d already been thinking a lot about acorns. The kids and I really like them. We collect them, put them in potions, count them, line them up, look closely at how they are different from one another, stash them in our pockets, crack them open, roll them across countless surfaces, test gravity with them, and occasionally attempt to put them in our mouths (eww—please stop, you are not a squirrel).

This school year has been what botanists call a mast year. Oak trees do this amazing thing—they have one year where they produce cartloads more acorns than the years before and after. Scientists don’t know exactly why this happens, but one likely explanation is that if trees produced the same number of acorns every year, the animals that eat them would eat every single one. Zoologist Walt Koenig once said, “The world runs on acorns,” because so many creatures depend on them.

But when there is a mast year—when there are thousands more acorns than usual—the acorn eaters (squirrels, doves, jays, deer, and even Henry David Thoreau) can’t possibly eat them all, and some are left behind to grow into future trees.

To me, the most amazing thing about a mast year is that it’s not just the oak tree on our playground doing this. It’s every oak tree everywhere. Every live oak on our campus, every live oak in San Antonio, and indeed every oak tree across the world. Somehow, they have their mast years together.

No one knows exactly how oak trees make this decision or how they communicate with each other to do it. I like to imagine them talking—gathering their resources and psyching each other up: This is it. This is the year.

It’s a mystery I like to wonder over. All the oak trees in all the world talking to each other. Recognizing that if they work together they can outwit the squirrels (or doves or jays or deer or Henry David Thoreaus). They seem to know something important—that there is great power in their interconnectedness.

A few weeks ago at Sprouts we celebrated Friendship Week. We talked about things we say to our friends, things we do with our friends, and the ways we treat one another. But every single day at school we also repeat a phrase the children know by heart: “We’re all on the same team.” (The kids actually shout this—there’s a good chance the whole neighborhood has heard it.)

Just like the oak trees, we know there is a great power in our interconnectedness.