April began with plenty of showers, so hopefully our flowers will be extra beautiful in May. Rainy days can still be fun, though. Some of our rainy days we spent clipping flower pictures from a seed catalog and creating lovely flower collages. This activity provided some opportunities to talk about shapes and colors while honing fine motor skills as the kids cut and glued the images. Another rainy day gave us time to make fingerprint flowers. The children practiced drawing

June brings the beautiful summer flowers, and with them... the BUGS! The children and I learned about several different types of common bugs this month through a variety of sources including books, matching games, pretend play, and real-life interactions with bugs. Searching for bugs around the yard was a favorite activity in the beginning of the month. The children and I brainstormed areas we should look for the bugs. Through our search, we learned that many bugs live on

Today's apple theme was upstaged a bit by the fun and enthusiasm that always goes into our bread making. The children began by adding yeast... ....then sugar (usually we use honey, but we were out!)... ...then a mix of flaxseed, sunflower seeds, oatmeal, millet, and cornmeal... ...and then flour... ...more flour... ... and extra flour followed by a good stir and lots of kneading. While our bread rose and we waited, the children and I set out for an end-of-summer walk. Since

August has been a perfect month for sunflowers- our two mammoth sunflowers outdoors are just beginning to bud (at about 7-8 feet tall!), and so our morning pretend session included cooking up and serving some sunflower seed bread with sunflower seed butter. We've also been enjoying two sweet sunflower-themed fingerplays. One of them goes like this: Here is my garden (make one palm flat toward ceiling) I rake with care (make raking motions with three fingers of opposite han

While we had a nice time doing our morning routine, the fun really began when we started bringing out the lego-type blocks! First we started with the biggest blocks for the littles. I had the big kids build towers with the large legos while the littles and I worked on learning to seat the blocks properly and hold down the base of their towers so they could build higher. After a little while they got the hang of it and enjoyed playing on their own. Soon after, I brought out

This morning started off looking quite dreary and we thought we'd be resigned to a day of indoor play, but it turned out that wasn't the case. We began with our regular morning routine, then we launched right into the art project for today- coloring Easter eggs! First, the older children drew on the egg shells with a white crayon. After the eggs were ready, I presented the children with all the bottles of food coloring we had. We wanted to make a rainbow of eggs, so we lined

Happy April Fool's Day! We changed over our calendar from March to April with great fanfare- we are so excited to put the winter months behind us! During calendar time we talked about funny April Fool's jokes we could play. We also looked at the pictures on the Easter and Earth Day tags on our calendar. We are excitedly awaiting the Easter Bunny's visit, and we want to help make the Earth healthier and cleaner on Earth Day. This morning we worked on a guided art project.

Spring is so close we can feel it in the air! We had a bit of a sleepy morning because of changing the clocks this past Saturday, so we kept things simple and did our regular calendar, weather, and circle time routines, then following up with some music to help us get more energized. We enjoyed singing along and dancing to several of our favorites including our March Wind song, the A-B-C's, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Big Rock Candy Mountain, Skip to My Lou, and Yankee Doo

What a wonderful day to be outside! Since the sun was shining down so cheerfully and our energy levels were high, we went on an outdoor adventure first thing after breakfast. We walked up and down the sidewalks with big snowbanks on either side of us. It was a great time to practice walking together as a group since the snowbanks contained the children who were inclined to wander. We encountered some slippery ice and I showed the littles how to shuffle along so they wouldn

Today the children and I had an amazing time playing in the aftermath of the biggest snowstorm of the season! It was a truly memorable day. We began just like normal with our calendar and weather routines. We changed the calendar over to February and talked about the holidays we'd be celebrating. We talked about Groundhog Day, but since we had so few daycare kids (because of the weather and some scheduled days off), we decided to postpone our Groundhog Day celebration. We

What a great day it was today! The sun was finally shining and everyone seemed energetic and refreshed. We had a wonderful time doing our morning routines. In fact, they went so quickly and smoothly that we had plenty of time for the block play that took up most of the rest of the morning. We began by having the bigger children count out ten square blocks of the same size and shape, then having them assemble the blocks into a tower. Tower building with legos is the wheelh

I try to fit block play in with the children about once per week. Blocks are what childhood education experts call "open-ended" toys, and anyone who has recently watched the Lego movie knows just what I mean... Legos and other blocks have the potential to be something other than and greater than just blocks- they can be a tower to knock down, stairs, a barn, a castle, a cave, a racetrack... the possibilities are literally endless. It is toys like this that help spark childre