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Celebrating Cinco de Mayo was tons of fun, and I'm pretty sure the kids liked the activities I planned. We ended up spreading the activities over two days since we ran out of time the first day.
After our morning routine, the big kids and I worked together on scissors skills and cut construction paper triangles to turn into a colorful banner. We talked about the proper way to hold the scissors (thumb in the little hole, fingers in the big hole) and practiced the open-close-open-close movement and the close-open-slide forward movement once we actually started cutting the paper. The kids did a fantastic job and our banner looked very festive!
Our second line of business was using crayons to decorate homemade pinatas. We used brown paper bags and the children were free to decorate them in whatever way they liked.
The littles and I worked together on proper crayon grip and perservering through coloring a relatively big area. We were all happy that this was an instance when the white crayon could easily be seen on the brown paper.
Once the pinatas were decorated, we shredded the leftover construction paper scraps to make "confetti" to put in the pinatas.
All that tearing is great for fine motor development! The kids each put a few handfuls of confetti in their pinatas. Next, the big kids crumpled newspaper into balls to put inside their pinatas, and then the pinatas were ready for candy! That was my job.
After all the preparation, we went outside and had tons of fun playing in the mud kitchen, sandbox, and back yard in general.
The children came in and we had a dance party to some mariachi music. These kids all know lots of awesome dance moves!
Soon it was time to enjoy tacos for lunch.
We ended up saving the pinatas for Thursday. I strung up some rope to dangle the pinatas, and the children took turns hitting their pinata with a bat while the rest of the children sat safely on the sidelines.
The paper bags turned out to be quite resistant to bats, so we had to make a little hole in each one so it would burst properly. All that swinging was great exercise, and the reward was sweet!
We also had lots of fun during block play time on Thursday. The big kids built some neat structures first while the littles took turns practicing "in and out."
Later, the big kids worked very well together to make the tallest towers they could. They built them so tall that they had to be careful when the towers toppled over. You can see from the laughter in this picture that crashing down a big Lego tower is lots of fun!
I was so pleased to see such wonderful teamwork from the big kids- they came up with a strategy on their own and there were no quarrels about taking turns.
See you tomorrow!