Another Great Hump Day

Yeah I got my Memory Card back!! I miss my camera when I don't have it. We do so many things and I want Mom's and Dad's to see us at work!!! I know if I had to go to work it would brighten my day to stop and take a peek into their day :)

Little Miss M is actually "writing" her name. She would wait until someone started saying letters and she would tuck her head down and start "writing." Too cute!!

This is a huge reason I love multi-age learning. Little Miss M has the best of both worlds. She has all the time to play and socialize, but when she wants to, she can pick up a crayon and "write" like the big kids. She gets the positive reinforcement from her friends, and they get the feeling of "teaching" her to write her name. They enjoy helping each other.

We had some time today to take out the water colors. You can't tell in this picture, but she really loved mixing the colors in the water and would continue to dip the brush in the water then a color, then the water, then a color again. In the end it was a nice shade of black and Little Miss M was very proud of herself, and rightly so!!!

Here is our Valentine Creating Center. We have been going through about 4 to 5 sheets of stickers since Monday. I think I need to run out and get some more :) I also added lots of the Valentine Day Cards you see at the store for school, but they haven't been the hit I thought they would be. They instead like the pre-cut paper hearts or the ones they trace and cut out themselves. Then they embellish them with the stickers or the many different stampers I have available.

As you can see... Our Kitty's are never to far from the fun :)

Spending a little time in the sensory table.

Here Ry is tracing a large Heart onto his paper. He is making a Valentine for his Grandma!!

Ahhhh... here the crowd has gathered to make their Valentine Card holders. Tomorrow we will begin sorting all our Valentines into each bag. I will also have some special name cards that will sort tomorrow and then use to play a variation of musical chairs (more later).

Again, the stickers and smelly markers were a hit!!

I introduced these cards about 2 weeks ago. They are a mitten matching and counting game. It is hard to explain, go to Prekinders and take a look. (They have a huge amount of printables!!!) Well, these cards have sat on the shelf getting no traffic. Today I took out cards 1 to 5 and showed the kids how to play the Memory game with them. It was a huge hit.

It was really cute to see them root for each other. Only a few of them (usually those with older siblings) know that there is a winner. Yet, for the most part, even those who only got 1 match had fun rooting for the other person they were playing with. We try to keep the competition to a minimum :)

The end of the morning was a nice quiet time to sit, converse, and practice tracing and cutting. The kids were so excited about tracing and cutting out the hearts that they went through a lot of paper practicing it. The then colored, glued, and made some beautiful hearts for their families!!

We had a really great morning... productive and fun. My sister and niece are coming to visit next week... just in time for Chinese New Year!! So I have been planning how I will fit in Chinese New Year, Presidents Day, and the Dental Health activity I want to do!! We also have more birthdays, St. Patricks Day, Easter, my, my... what a busy, busy time :)

Hump Day

It's Wednesday!! The dreaded middle of the week... can we get through to Friday??

Today was a great day... Our morning started out pretty slow, we had built forts, made play-doh, played in the sensory table, and gotten out all the books before 10am... I thought what else are we going to do??? I knew we had Circle Time to still do and I wanted to change out some emergent reader books with some of the kids, but I knew that wasn't going to take the whole morning... but after I introduced the Snowman project at the art table... I didn't realize that it was noon by the time we were finished... HUH...

This was our fort this morning... and there is Ryan hiding inside. The boys pretty much played here with their 4-wheelers and pretending to be Monster Truck Drivers.

The Princess enjoyed helping to make the play-doh... they never get tired of it and they love how it comes out warm :)

I always have open-ended art opportunities out for the kids, but when I showed them the table of play-doh with odds and ends to make a snow man, they kept asking me how, what do I want them to do. It only took one or two times of saying, "Anything you want to do" or "This is your Snowman, you can make him into anything you want." They then went to town and didn't stop for an hour. They walked away and came back many, many times.

Little Miss M was having a ball today... she jumped right into the flour sensory table (and Yes the idea for the sensory table came from Lisa Murphy's website... Ooey Gooey... an inspiration for me!! I studied those photo's of hers until I thought I could make one myself. Little did I know if I had just punched in PVC Sensory Table I would have gotten actual plans online... live and learn)

Anyway... Little Miss M got a lot of fine motor skill practice today, sensory fun, and even some cause and effect... the taste of homemade play-doh is very salty... YUCK!!

I love this photo... that little hand... so sweet and learning so much all the time

Sydney loves scissors and she has been practicing all the time... she loves this activity because she can just scrunch the play-doh back together and start again. She hates the fine motor activity of cutting paper into bits and then putting it into a bowl or bag. She loves to cut, and the draw of doing the cutting is so overwhelming, she does it... then walks away. So, she and I usually do the picking up part together :) But this activity is right up her alley... Cut, scrunch, cut, scrunch... LOVE IT!!!

Here we are cleaning the table after we were done... another fun and great activity. We scrubbed, rinsed, scrubbed, dumped and scrubbed and rinsed some more.

We had a great morning... we learned so much just by being today. We talked about the day, we sang the days of the week song while we worked, we measured, mixed, problem solved, socialized, and read books... just a few things from our Hump Day. Who says Wednesdays can't be fun :)

**Moms & Dads... Remember there will be no Childcare on Monday, January 18th!! We will be closed in Honor of Martin Luther King Day**