Great Books and Drum Machine Hooks!

It was a muddy morning as friends got dropped off. We quickly went in for a delicious snack of pears and dried apricots. We easily moved on to circle time, where we found logs that could become drumsets, as well as a fun drum machine lent to us by Teo's family! There were a few cool programmed beats that we jammed and danced to, and every one took turns making cool noises by banging on the electronic drumset (although Annabelle was very interested in looking out the window at this time!) Then, we read Ivy's book called The Snail and the Whale and Annabelle's book called Bears on Chairs. These were two excellent books! We were happy to see the majority of our friends show us how focused they could be for these long stories! Teo was eager to stand and react to parts of the stories with jumps, while Paislie and Theo spent some time reading with us, and some time cuddling with the nap mats. Wren, Teo, Annabelle, Asher, Joey, Ben, Koichi, and Alanna were engrossed in the storytelling. Annabelle enjoyed pointing out to the class how many bears were on some of the pages. Alanna and Joey wanted to point out the different animals we saw, like sharks and octopi, and every one was interested in counting bears together. Ivy was just excited to see what happened next in her book. We  talked about whales, snails, the ocean, ocean creatures, bears, and chairs.

After circle time we went to our tables to find the spider potato prints every one made  and (Ben and Annabelle made theirs today!). We learned that spiders have eight eyes, so we all counted to eight together. Then, we proceded to pass out googly eyes as we counted and help our friends with glue so they could paste eight googly eyes onto their spiders. Alanna got busy switching her eyes around, Teo managed to make some of his eyes disappear (uh oh!), but mostly every one was very interested in counting the eyes and carefully placing them onto their picture. Before we knew it it was time to squeeze in some outdoor play. We all walked to the deck and hung out with the pre-tots. There were cars to ride and balloons to bounce, every one got busy.

We had no Spanish for today as Leona couldn't make it, so we took advantage of our extra time with dance parties and free play, every one was in a great mood. We rearranged the room and decided to make a fun collage using magazines. We combined the tables to make one giant table, and every one had the chance to tear pages out of magazines, tear them more, or crumple them, and then glue them to a large sheet of paper. Wren, Koichi, and Ben had tons of fun as the glue dried on their hands and they were able to pick off small pieces. The finished product is hanging over the potty area. Then Ben, Theo, and Asher lots of fun finding torn pieces of paper and putting them in the recycling bin. We had a delicious snack of hummus and multi-grain chips, cleaned up, got shoes on, and went outside where we had a great end of day.

Love,

Dom and Jackie