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This morning, as we watched the colors of the sunrise washed across the sky, one of the kids noticed the trees looked white. We talked a little about frost, but we mostly enjoyed the shifting colors and beauty of the sunrise.
After breakfast, we started our day with calendar, weather, circle, and sharing time. We had a breakthrough when one of our littlest people spun in a circle like everyone else while we did our "Dance Like Snowflakes" movement rhyme. We were all so proud of her, and the two older children cheered for her! Yay! It's yet another example of the learning process- chidren learn so much from observation and repetition.
We worked a little on our "Snowman" song today. It goes like this:
When I look outside my window
And I see the ground is white,
I think of building snowmen
Morning, noon, and night!
I put on all my winter gear;
My boots, my coat, my hat,
My scarf and then my mittens,
And clap, clap, clap!
(spoken: "because I like...")
Snowmen, snowmen, snowmen,
Roll three balls!
Snowmen snowmen, snowmen,
Stack them tall!
Snowmen, snowmen, snowmen,
Make a face,
Put the features in the right place!
We came up with the next verse:
My snowman needs two eyes to see
And then he needs a nose.
Two walnuts and a carrot
Should take good care of those.
To finish off his face,
My snowman needs a smile-
A curvy line of pebbles
Should last a nice long while!
The kids did some awesome dancing, and some of them enjoyed keeping the beat!
Im excited to work on a snowman craft with the kids tomorow that focuses on building just the features we're singing about in our song.
It was a little too cold to go out in the morning, so we deicded to do some ball chases, dancing, and "gymnastics" to stay active. Somersaults and headstands are our favorites right now. We tried to teach some of the smaller people how to do somersaults... some were more willing than others!
Once we got our wiggles out, we enjoyed playing at feeding the babies. We talked bout what babies like to eat, whether babies have teeth, and what you should use to feed a baby. I demonstrated taking scoops of pretend food out of a bowl and offering it to the baby, and the kids were happy to do the same. Though there were plenty of dolls to go around, sometimes the poor baby dolls got double-teamed!
The baby feeding play naturally led into kitchen play, and I helped to gently resolve conflicts through redirection a few times. It is so important to model good conflict resolution skills! Unless a child is in iminent danger, I state what the problem is ("You both want the spoon"), validate the children's emotions ("You are both upset about this."), and then redirect the play ("Oh, I wonder where there are more spoons... Let's look around and find one!"). This approach works nearly all the time, and it helps the children learn to resolve conflict peacefully.
We wrapped up our morning by working together to put the kitchen items away so we had room to color with crayons. The littles were encouraged to make marks on their paper while the older children and I worked on drawing snowmen together. We came out with some pretty respectable snowmen and some really good effort.
We finished our day by reading The Snowy Day and Just a Snowman, and then we headed outside to take advantage of what little daylight was left. It was encouraging that it actually was light enough to get outside after naptime- this is the first time it's happened since fall.
See you tomorrow!