Preschoolers working with numbers

On Friday in preschool we decided to make our own playdough and cut out and decorate numbers 1-5.
Both children know their numbers and quantity so well now, they are even really great and knowing 1 more than or less than numbers, little smarty-pants!
No cook playdough recipe
2 1/2 cups flour
1/2 cup salt
2 tsp cream of tarter
2 cups boiling water
3 tablespoons oil
2 packages KookAid or food color and extract
Combine all ingredients well, store in ziplock bag

Wiggly worms in the rain

I said we like worms!!!! Coming back from school in the rain the kiddies decided to collect worms and release them in our garden! After all worms are so good for the earth in the garden, great little workers!

Goop

This recipe has been a long standing favorite around here with preschool & afterschool, and I must admit that I totally love playing with it too!
1 part water
2 parts cornstarch
A little food coloring
A little essential oil for smell

Pick it up and form a solid ball in your hand, open your fingers and voila! Turns to liquid and drips through fingers. Awesome fun science!

Colored pasta

Thanks to My friend Leslie, we tried this recipe to color pasta for some crafts tomorrow.
Mix pasta and 8 drops food coloring in a tsp of rubbing alcohol in a zip lock bag, close bag and shake!
Dry pasta in a cookie sheet about 30 minutest makes really nice brilliant colors.
Now to see what the kids decide to do with it tomorrow....

Earth Day April 22

The children and I love Spring for so many reasons, but one of them is certainly the extra focus on Earth day!
I took the preschoolers out to clean up garbage in our nearby nature path this morning, they were so proud to collect the trash in the path, we noticed that this year there seemed far less garbage than other years:)
This afternoon, the after schoolers chalked Earth day messages in the driveway! They did a great job sending a powerful message.
We will spend lots of time over the next week picking up garbage and talking about what else we can do to help save our planet.

Worms!!!!!

We LOVE Spring!!!! A first real sign of Spring is seeing the worms after a night time rain. Today was our first day to spot these wonderful little wiggly friends this year. On the way to school this morning we counted 177 worms!!! That is possibly the highest count we have had yet!I will take the preschoolers out this morning and hope they are as excited about these worms as we were!!!
Preschoolers couldn't imagine what 177 worms would look like, it's a very big number, so they counted out sets of 10 links until we could see how many that was....that's alot of worms!!

Kite flying season??

Today we attempted to fly kites, seemed very windy but this is the best we could do.....these little pocket kites are the best though, small and easy to manage, easy to take out and put away:)

Sidewalk Revolution

One of our neighbors has inspired us last year and again this Spring to take part in the Occasional-End-of-the-driveway-sidewalk revolution. Creating inspirations in chalk on the end of the driveway for others to enjoy. We certainly enjoyed her art last summer, looking forward to her daily message. After school, the kids have been inspired to follow her lead. Today we found a box of brand new chalk in our mailbox and walked down to see what her message was and continued to create our own. What's great way to get a positive message out to people, right on the end of your driveway!
Puts a smile on our face every time!

Springtime Shadows

Preschool went for our first Springtime walk, we looked for signs of Spring and enjoyed playing with our shadows. Fletcher was interested in seeing that we were following our shadows instead of them following us as they were in front of us...... I see a shadow project coming up!

It's marble time!!!

Gotta lovevSpringtime and marbles!! We like to play marbles inside but still get the motivation every spring.
How do we play? Set a piece of yarn out on a carpeted area, everyone tosses 5 marbles into the circle and picks a shooter to use. When it's your turn; shoot the shooter into the circle and try to knock out as many marbles as a you can, whatever you get out, you keep!! Good old fashioned fun!

Making clay sculptures

Today preschool had a visit with Skye. He decided to show them how to work with clay, how to score and wet the pieces that were to be placed together. It was fun! Skye makes a great little preschool teacher;)
Isabel made butterflies
Skye made fletcher
Fletcher mad Skye into penguin ;)
I made mat man

Kindermusik Spring Session

I will be holding a Kindermusik Family Time class on Mondays @ 10:30 starting April 22!!
This session will be Colors & Shapes on the farm~super fun & educational curriculum with digital materials, come join the fun!
Miss Trish

Fundraising for Butterflies

We are holding our annual Vessey's fundraiser!! We would like to purchase monarch butterfly larvae and study the butterfly life cycle in both preschool, afterschool and even Kindermusik will have an opportunity to enjoy this project!!!!

From World Wildlife Federation:
Monarch Butterflies drop by 59%

The Monarch Butterfly is just now leaving its winter home in Mexico, occupying less area – under 3 acres – of oyamel fir forest in Mexico’s central highlands than ever before recorded. Causes for the decline include loss of the monarch’s only host plant, illegal logging; heavy ecotourism in Mexico; and climate change in breeding and wintering grounds.

Let me know if you are interested in seeing the catalogue for spring planting!! Orders must be in by April24!!!
Miss Trish