And It Comes To an End...

 Happy 5th Birthday Boston!

Thank you all for sharing your wonderful children with me this year.  

Under the Sea

With the rainy weather on Tuesday it almost felt like we were under the sea.  After the rain abated some, we went and splashed in the puddles.  Is there anything more delightful than the pure joy of watching children splash in puddles?  I also got to watch their faces light up as they fished for letters then created words from these letters.  We looked at numerous pictures of fish and sea creatures and spent some time discussing the environments that they thrive in.  Among other books, we read The Rainbow Fish and discussed how we can be happy helping others.  We danced and danced and sang one of their most favorite songs, "Slippery Fish".  What a fantastic week!

Creating their fishy masterpieces.

 Feeding the butterflies that hatched much earlier than I anticipated.  One of these years I'm going to time it just right, so we can release the butterflies on the last day of preschool.  I know the symbolism of that is beyond the children, but for me as their teacher and you as their parents, I know you appreciate the metamorphosis that has occurred this year.

 Love Porsche's big flouncy hat bouncing about while playing hopscotch.

Waiting for the butterflies to emerge from their little homes.

The butterflies flying away amidst loud cheers from the children (thankfully my neighbors are kind).

 Their plants have done wonderful this year.  Hopefully later this summer there will be watermelons and pumpkins growing about. It's been so fun to watch them with pride in their eyes observe the growth of their little plants.

 Happy 5th Birthday Kyler!

 Watch out- vicious sharks on the attack!

Of course, on fish day we just had to feed the fish in the pond.  There were so many that came to gobble up my stale bread.  The turtles even came to join in the feast.   

I'm still not sure how Porsche shoe ended up as fish food but alas it did.  I ended up wading into that yucky water to retrieve it.  Then I lost my shoe in the process.  Lots of laughs at the pond (and lots of soap scrubbing the yuck off my legs).

Creepy Crawlies

I must confess I am not much of an entomologist.  Bugs creep me out, but alas they are such a huge part of our world that we must explore them at preschool.  The children seem to be free from the hesitations I have with holding bugs or having them creep on me.  They were fabulously curious about all the insects around them.  We watched a clip of a video that showed insects very up close and we learned about their body parts and how they are created to trick their predators.  

Counting ladybug spots.  The children actually took turns being the teacher and got to write out the number of the spots to be put on the ladybugs.  They are getting better at writing out their numerals.

Observing the ladybugs in ladybug land.  My biggest fear is the top would pop off and I'd have ladybugs all over, but the children were very careful and just watched in awe as they scurried about.  We also watched caterpillars until they decided to build their cocoons.

They found oh so many insects in they backyard...

 and by the pond.

 Porsche made little name tags for her snack- so cute!

The ants go marching two by two hurrah hurrah!

Kings, Queens, Castles & Thingsm

Looking beyond the fluffy (but very fun) Disney Princess explosion in our world, there are many great learning opportunities associated with Kings and Queens.  We talked quite a bit about brave and kind Knights and Kings and Queens who use their manners.    The children were a bit surprised when I showed them pictures of real life Kings and Queens (Thank you England for keeping your royalty). Such a fun week and a reminder to me that their is royalty within each of these little ones.

 The classic lacing shapes are a classic for a reason.  Working on fine motor skills is preparing them for all that writing that is in their future.

 Before you can become a Knight you must practice saving a damsel in distress.  First you have to ride your horse and use your lance to fight off the bad guys (it was a balloon that Kyler had just popped).

 After crossing the moat and storming the castle you come face to face with the dragon-tossing bean bags at him is the best way to get rid of him.  Then you get to save the princess!  All the Knights did fabulous and saved the princess each time.

 The kids had so much fun with these crackers with letters stamped on each one.  Cheeze-its aren't something I buy normally, but when they encourage early literacy I'm all for it.

 We talked about how shields were important to identify the Knights.  The children thought about what they could put on their family coat of arms.  In the end it was so much fun to just cover them up with paint.

 Our Jousting Tournament

 On Guard...Our Knights and Princess Knights in shining armor.

 The children could absolutely loved this straw builder set.  Seriously, they didn't want to do anything else.  So we built in the morning...

 and kept building...

And built some more.  Even then, it was with great reluctance that they cleaned them up (I promised them we would play with them this Summer)

Avah is such a pretty Princess!

Earth Day

It was so fun to discuss the earth as it is such a complete part of our everyday life.  The children really seemed to relate to the science experiments and the circle time discussions on our earth.  I hope you've heard the phrase, "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" in your home since then.  

This children created obstacle course was truly unique and kept them all completely engaged and working together for our entire outdoor time period.

Racing through it was just as fun as putting it all together. 

Our art project was to reuse or recycle items to create works of art.
Boston is using those extremely important critical thinking skills to figure his project out.

Porsche hard at work creating.

Gideon and his one-of-a kid creation.

They play so well together and have really learned to share, take turns and be kind.

Working on puzzles to start the day.

Boston put that pencil behind his ear so he could be just like his daddy!

Creating our own earths.

Or a lion (it's all good!)

Birds Of A Feather

 I can so tell it the end of the year is coming because it's taking me longer to blog about our preschool days and I haven't been taking very many pictures.  I often find myself so involved in what we are doing I forget to snap a picture of it.  I did remember to take a picture of our class visitor- a baby bird that Kooper and Avah found.  They were so thoughtful to bring it so all the preschoolers could meet him/her? It was a
great introduction to our fabulous bird week.  We spent a lot of time talking about the birds around us, listening for their various calls and watching for them out our windows.  Whenever we are outside now I can count on one of them pointing out birds to the class or telling everyone to quiet down so they can hear the birds.  I've had to brush up a bit on my bird identifying skills as they seem to notice ones I haven't!

Meeting the baby bird

Cute as can be!

Kooper trying to keep the feathers flying.  This required intense concentration and lots of breath!

Painting their bird houses

The whole class working on creating a bird hatching out of an egg.

These creations then became prime additions to playtime.

Avah working on stringing cereal for her bird feeder.

We just love this silly boy!

Beep Beep

Cars and boats- what could be more fun than learning about these forms of transportation. We talked a lot about safety around cars (never ever get in one by yourself in the heat and don't play behind them, etc). They checked out all the components of my truck and loved going for a ride (backing out of the garage) so that we could investigate under the hood. What a curious group!

Porsche making sure her cars get to the right numbered garage.

More counting cars.

I put these kids to work washing all the preschool "cars".

What a happy helper!

Rhythm stick fun. After warming up a bit we were actually all able to stay on the same beat. This is wonderful activity for practicing patterns.

Driving cars through paint to create masterpieces.

I just love their creativity! The car parking structure become so much more than that during playtime.

Charlie figuring out which shapes used together can make a picture of things that go.

Will it sink or float? This fun science experiment gave the children a chance to immediately test their hypothesis and they turned out to be quite accurate in their predictions.

Making boats. With numerous building supplies I knew there would be variances in their boats but I had no idea how completely different they would be.

I didn't get a picture of us trying to race our boats made out of ice or the boys fishing for letters or them singing "The Wheels on the Bus" or the many other things we did during this wonderful week of preschool.