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:)