Happy Birthday, Oliver! Oliver turns 5 today!

This morning a fire truck visited our neighborhood. Melinda walked a couple friends down the block to explore it!

We removed the sand tub from our sensory table (Thank you, Charlie!)and added race cars, ramps and road signs. F.3.9 Make roads for toy trucks and cars. A few friends added flags and other race track details to a teacher drawn race track. F.4.1 Draw pictures and scribble to generate and express ideas.

Tami bought us neon colored golf tees! We unearthed some Styrofoam and many friends enjoyed hammering golf tees in and using their fingers to pull golf tees out! F.3.4 Participate in a variety of gross/fine motor and sensory activities. F.6.18 Imitate the use of an adult tool in play.

To stay cool while playing outside this morning, friends filled up plastic watering buckets, pouring out and refilling over and over.

For lunch we served farm fresh scrambled eggs with shredded cheese, buttered whole wheat bread, mixed veggies and apple/pineapple fruit salad. F.3.36 Help clean up after doing an activity.

Have a great day!

Happy Hot Tuesday!

Through a group effort here at WF, every child in our classroom has an
Electronic Portfolio (EP) started and it has been emailed to parents. A few notes about the EP’s:

• Our goal is one weekly for each child. However, some weeks you may get more than one and others may not have any.
• We will email your child’s entire file in pdf format each time rather than page by page. It is easier for us to store them this way. When the file gets large enough that it gets “slow”, we’ll start a new one.
• Be sure to scroll down to see the latest entry in your child’s EP each time you get an email.
• Our goal is to email the EP’s as they are written, but some may come later.
• The email address that is used to email the EP’s is not checked with any regularity, so please direct any responses to our personal emails. Otherwise we may not see that you responded.

 

This morning we exercised some fine motor muscles by stringing small beads into necklaces and bracelets. Our older friends strung the beads onto the yarn while our younger friends used their pincer grasp to pick up one bead at a time, identifying colors.

Using our bath sponges we washed and scrubbed appropriate body parts while singing and dancing to “Bubbles in the Bathtub” from the album Funky Fish Party by singer David Chicken. An easy tune to download!

Afterwards, friends requested “The Cheesehead Special”; a song we sang last fall. We created an eye/hand coordination game with the foam cheese hat: everyone sat in a circle and passed the ‘cheesehead’ around. When the music stopped, whoever held the cheesehead, stood up, put the hat on and did a funky cheesehead dance. Friends played cooperatively, rhythmically and imaginatively!

At journal time we assessed what we have learned about race cars:

*You always have seat belts, stay on the track and if you break down you go to the pit crew for help.

*You drive them.

*Go Carts go fast and have lawn mower motors.

*You can go really fast and if the car is damaged, you are still safe.

* You have to go fast AND keep your car on the road.

*You go fast.

*You could race against sheep.

* You need helmets and fireproof suits.

We started brain storming a name for our Wee Friends car race.

For lunch we had whole wheat egg noodles w/ shredded carrots & kidney beans, mixed vegetables, and fruit salad (that included the fresh strawberries picked by our preschoolers at the farm yesterday!).

Have a great day!

CREEPY CRAWLY BABY SPIDERS!!!

This week the children have been closely examining the baby spiders that Tami captured off of her deck at home. Yesterday afternoon, we released the spiders into our garden. Hopefully, we will end up some pest control by adding the spiders!

The children watched with great interest as the baby spiders fled their captivity in the jar and ran toward the freedom of our vegetable plants. The spiders seemed to be flying because they were moving with such speed and their webs were so small that they were not very visible. The children were very close so many of them ended up with a baby spider climbing on them!

To better investigate their webs, Tami tinted the jar with blue powder so that the tiny web patterns would be visible. The children were amazed that in just 4 days, the baby spiders had filled the entire jar with webs! (And some of the children were just very fascinated with the blue tempera powder that Tami used to tint the web!)

Below are some photos from today!

We celebrated Melinda’s 60th Birthday this afternoon! She was surprised and very happy with the box of 60 cards. Thank you to all that contributed them.

The last picture is what happens to the first candle by the time you light 60 of them!

Here’s a pictorial look at our morning as our tumbling groups rotated!

 

For lunch we served cream cheese and shredded carrots on whole wheat tortillas, apple sauce and Mexican style veggies.

Have a great day!