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Today dawned grey and rainy, so we could tell we were going to have some fun indoors for a change. Once we finished our calendar, weather, and circle time routine, we set up a big tent village.
When the thrill of crawling through the long tubes wore off, we had fun pretending we were camping in the woods. The children and I used smooth river rocks to make a pretend campfire ring and put the orange silk in the middle for a fire, then we sat around it and I helped provide some prompts to make up a silly story together. The children took turns adding onto the story.
After that, it was time for us to retire to our tents...
One child really wanted the feeling of sleeping in the "pitch dark, where there's only the stars," so she used blankets to cover her tent, and soon after everyone wanted to cover their tents, too, so I gathered all the blankets we had and worked with the children to cover the tents.
After a bit more tent play, we cleaned up and worked on making beaded suncatchers in the colors and shape of the sun in honor of summer Solstice. The children and I worked together to string pony beads on a pipe cleaner in a pattern. Everyone did a fantastic job as they worked slowly and methodically. Stringing beads is a fantastic fine motor skills builder!
The weather was so cool and damp that we made warm and comforting vegetable soup for lunch.
The biggest child got to practice cutting up carrots and celery while the smaller children continued to work on fine motor skills. They opened the tiny blocks of vegetable bullion and measured out cupfuls of frozen vegetables.
The soup turned out to be delicious, especially accompanied by some of the homemade rolls leftover from another day. Whenever we have extra rolls we freeze them because they're so tasty we don't want to waste any.
Later in the day we were able to go outside for just a few minutes in between sprinkles. It was nice to get some fresh air, and together we looked for worms and frogs. We found some worms, but no frogs today.
See you next week!