All Mixed Up

To start preschool off with a bang (or maybe a fzzzzzssshhh), we made the classic volcanoes.  Of course, this is an absolute favorite among the little ones I know!

We make a lot of planned mixtures, like moon sand:

But finally I forced myself to stop cringing at the spills, waste, and seemingly purposeless mixing the kids always want to do afterward.  And AMAZING things began to happen!

More "pleases" and "thank you's" were heard on the day the kids mixed mud pies and garnished their dishes with every type of vegetation they could find.

 When I let them mix Dixie cups of vinegar, baking soda, corn starch, flour, water, corn syrup, and vegetable oil to their hearts content, they began asking each other for advice, teaching one another their new recipes, and even saying things like, "aahhhh, I mixed bases and nothing happened!" 

Amazing things happen when you give children the tools they need to learn and a few basic lessons.  They will grow more than ever when they can direct their own education.

A Royal Treat

Kings, Queens, Princesses, Frogs!  This was by far the kids' favorite preschool theme.

I had the most fun once they donned their super-duper crazy and wild jester hats and started making up their own jokes and slapstick comedy routines.

Dragons and knights!

And no fairy tale adventure is complete without The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales.

Reading Music

Piano lessons were by far the most frustrating lessons I took as a child.  So I was hoping to make our introduction into reading music a little more fun for Billy and Alexa.

We filled glasses with different levels of water and colored each one with food coloring.  Then they played around for awhile experimenting with the different sounds they made.  Then Alexa drank some and they made even different sounds!

Then we made simple colored notes to guide them through songs they created on the glasses.

We shared this with the preschoolers and it was such a hit it made it into a weekly rotation.  We mixed it up a bit around the holidays with different colored jingle bells to shake rather than colored water glasses.

A Monster Mash!

October was party time in our house.  This year we combined the superhero party Billy wanted with the Halloween party he just HAD to have.  The result:

Monsters vs. Superheroes

Guests chose a side to support.

Then they took on some gholish pinatas.

Squared off in a donought eating contest.

And grabbed some monster guts!  Yuck!

 We used the standard spaghetti for brains, peeled grapes for eyeballs, and jello for guts.  All of the kids LOVED them!

aych-eye-kay-kay-elmo-pee (H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O-P)

Billy's been working on the alphabet for three years now, and hopefully we'll get it conquered in the next year.  I'm not sure Elmo Pee is acceptable in kindergaten!  For the last couple of days we've been working on a town-wide scavenger hunt for letters.  I set him loose with a camera and some street safety reminders and we hit the town.  The result is this poster that we framed with a poster frame and hung in the playroom.  Now that we have moved from Townsend to Manhattan, we especially like remembering the places from which each letter came.

The Not So Itsy Bitsy Spider

For the last couple of weeks we have had a giant spiderweb outside our window.  Billy really wants to watch the spider, but unfortunately it stays well hidden until dark.  Last night I video-taped him for Billy, but today a fly got caught in the web and the spider ran right down to eat him up!  Lucky Billy got to watch this HUGE spider catch the fly, roll it up, and haul it back into it's corner.  It's so cool when kids get to witness nature first hand.  Always the scientist, Billy now knows how a spider can't see well, but feels the bugs in the web and how it kills them.

And so later we made spiders to hang on a spider web in the preschool/playroom:

Then some spider masks.

And marble-in-a-box spider web paintings.

Stop, Drop, Rock & Roll

Fire Safety week was definitely one of those weeks where there was too much to do and not enough time.  We made a fire escape route obstacle course, sent home fire safety scavenger hunts, origami fire station dogs and firetrucks, and of course a lot of "stop, drop, rock & roll" practice.

We mixed red and yellow paint and blew it into flame shapes with straws.  Then our toy firefighters put out the fires.

A week of fire safety would not be complete without a trip to the local fire station!