Must be doing something right!

I have always loved reading and tried to pass that love on. We do story time every day here, at least before quiet time, but often several times in between. Imagine my giddiness when we sent the kids over to pick their book for story time and they sat down together and started reading to each other. It was the cutest thing I've seen in a while. I especially love that this is happening more and more!

Picasso in Training

Today was SO cool! We pulled out a large heavy sheet of paper and let the kids all paint together. The picture started out completely different than it ended up. Everyone was doing their own thing, but they decided they wanted to COVER the paper with color instead. It was really cool as the picture blended together. I then saw the perfect opportunity to talk about color blending, but they taught me something instead! They told me all about the volcano they made (the purple part) and how it was exploding (red colors) into the ocean below (blue at the bottom of the picture! How cool, creative and expressive they are! I hung this one up for about a month before the tape finally wore out :)

3D Art

Kids love to do art with just about anything! 3D objects are especially fun. And it's so neat to see what they can come up with. This particular day we did art with contact paper. The kids put whatever they wanted on the sticky side of clear contact paper. We then covered it with another clear piece and voila...they have their own version of a stained glass window! It's so valuable for kids to have the freedom to create art how they want to!



The older girls, ever my creative ones, decided to make bug playgrounds! I would have never thought of something that cool, but the detail was fabulous and they had a grand time putting it together!Cass loves the camera! Whenever I pull it out she's the first in line to give me a grin! Let it shine sweetie!

Indian Summer

Snow one week...70 degree weather the next! November weather was beautiful much of the month and we were able to spend a lot of time out in the backyard and at the school park. Outdoor play is SO valuable for kids and we try to go out at least once a day if possible. Another daycare provider I know says "There isn't inappropriate weather, only inappropriate clothing".

Also providing HOURS of fun this month was "the box". The kids had a great time for weeks in this. A great book, if you can find it, is "Christina Katerina and the Box". The story is so fun for kids, but also teaches a lot of good lessons. It reminds us of the creativity that is possible for each of us. There are also some good examples of how we should and shouldn't treat our friends in the book. It is currently out of print, but you can get it on Amazon.com for a reasonable price through a variety of sellers. This is an especially valuable book I think for the 4 or 5 year old and older set of kids.

Snow Day!

As anyone here in Cedar knows we got the first snow of the season this week. What a fantastic time for kids! One of the first things they asked to do that day was play out in the snow. So...we did! As you can see they had a great time. The little ones spent most of their time making tracks everywhere they could, playing "king of the hill" and chasing Koko through the snow. Oh and sampling the newly fallen cuisine was also a favorite.

The older kids went out after school and immediately set to stockpiling snowballs and setting up forts for battle. They were out there for over an hour, taking only a short hot chocolate break.

The snow's mostly gone now for this week anyway. But what a fun hint of what is to come!

C is for Cow, D is for Duck, Sept 28 - Oct 9

These two weeks we spent learning all about the farm and what FUN that was! We learned about what happens on a farm and what the farmers do. We spent lots of time learning about farm animals: cows, horses, chickens, ducks, pigs and sheep. Some of the activities we did these two weeks included:

Painting with Buttermilk and Chalk (dipping the chalk in buttermilk before you color with it makes it stick better to the paper)

Making our own Scarecrow (stuffing newpaper into a "farmer's" clothes)

Acting like animals

Listening to animal sounds and guessing what they were

Making butter (take whipping cream and shake it like crazy until butter forms. It has to be at room temperature to work though!)

Making A Horse of a different color (Pinning clothes pin legs on various colored horse shapes)

Played with different types of feathers

Walked like Chickens and Ducks

Made Patterns out of Animal Tracks

Painted our own farm scene on carboard then built on it with blocks and play animals

Sorted out which animals live on the farm and which don't

Deviled Eggs and Pigs in a Blanket

Drop the Feather Game

The hit of the week however was the SONGS! We learned Old MacDonald had a Farm, B-I-N-G-O and the Farmer in the Dell. The Chicken Dance was also a HUGE hit! Daily requests for singing time almost first thing every morning!

Drop the feather, also provided great opportunity for feeling different TYPES of feathers.

The Chicken Dance

Even the little ones love circle time!

Working on our scarecrow

Painting our farm.

Other fun things you could do at home to reinforce what we learned at school:

*Have your child dictate a "cow tale" or a "horse tale" to you. Have them tell a story about a cow or a horse and write it on a cow or a horse shape. Verbal and creative thinking skills will be reinforced with this project!
*Sorting seeds: Do you have seeds leftover from the garden or flower beds? Mix them together and let your child sort through them with tweezers. Have them sort them by size, shape, color or type into muffin tins or another divided container. This helps develop great pre-math skills.

*Clop, Clop: Provide different types of blocks and a plank of wood. Let them experiment to find the best "clopping" sound.

*Pig tails: Make piggies tails out of pipe cleaners by shaping around a pencil.

*Paper Plate Pigs: Make pig masks from paper plates, use small paper cups or section of TP tubes for snouts.

*Pretty in Pink: Let the kids mix red and white paint with their fingers to make pink and then paint with it.

B is for our Bodies, Sept 14 - 18

This week we learned about our Bodies and some of the senses we have. We learned that we all look different and can change the way we look by dressing differently too! We learned about our sense of touch and experimented with the sensations of ice and cloth and salt drawing. (If you want to do this at home, take table salt, sand or some other type of sensory material and let the kids draw pictures in it with their fingers. You can make this more interesting by adding dry tempura paint powder and calling it bee pollen [yellow], fairy dust, or something else creative).
We also learned about our sense of smell, charting which smells different class members liked.

We used Jello to create "scratch and sniff" pictures. Although the smell didn't last long enough to show our moms and dads...it was sure fun for us! (Moms - try using different objects for paintbrushes. Today we used Q-tips! Talk about easy clean up ;)

A is for Apple, Sept 8 -11

This week we learned all about the letter A and had our own little "apple fest" to go along with it. We had a great time measuring how many "apples" tall everyone was, charting the results, making apple pigs and doing a variety of apple art projects.

Want to try this cool foil project at home? Take aluminum foil and "paint" it with Elmer's glue and food coloring mixed together to your liking. Let it dry overnight. As it dries it will take on this cool shiny appearance that looks more milky when you first paint it. For this project we cut it into little squares and let the kid glue it onto apple shapes, but there are SO many things you could do with it with a little imagination.