Construction
Hello friends,
Early in the week we had the infamous Ollie, my wonderful teaching assistant, as a helper. He played basketball and hot potato, he read books during snack time, and generally just hung out and helped with school.
We started most days this week with a chill in the air, but by mid-day most of our friends have peeled off jackets and are quite comfortable. Please leave a warm sweatshirt or jacket in your child's bin for this next season of cooler days and remember to always start with a short sleeved tee shirt so they can peel off layers when they get hot.
Collaborative artwork can be a fun challenge. We'll continue to practice it because I greatly appreciate how it can take the mind away from product and force you to ultimately just be in the moment, with the medium. Why does it do this? Because just when you've painted your tree and sun and sky, someone else next to you is in the moment and their vision has their red paint all over your tree and sun and sky. Is it more trouble than it's worth to do this with preschoolers? I don't believe so. Remaining flexible about the outcome of painting is a good practice, allowing time to focus on colors and strokes and blending and keeping it fun. There will be many individual sheets of paper to paint on too, but I like to mix it up!
Midweek, we took a longer Woodcroft outing down to the playground area. Each child chose a small, wooden peg person and we stopped at the fairy village, decorated our little people into fairies and had a snack break. I shared a story with a few of our friends about Letter Fairies and we even found some of their craft work up in the trees. Look for a V, a, A and an X in our photos, a clear sign that Letter fairies live close by. More on that soon...
Thursday we cooked and constructed. We pulled apart cauliflower, chopped carrots and onions, and mixed broth and coconut milk in the pressure cooker. In the end, the immersion blender mixed up a delicious soup for us to enjoy at the end of the morning. While it cooked, we started building a sort of litter tray for under the roosting bars in the chicken's coop. This will make it easier to keep the coop cleaner and we've got some great helpers in our crew. I drilled holes and got some wood screws started but the wood was very hard to screw into for small hands, so out came the drill. You can imagine everyone wanted to use the electric drill, and they all got a chance to help.
Today we celebrated O's birthday by going to one of his favorite parks in Durham for our Field Trip Friday! He wore a birthday crown and friends had stuffed animals to play with all morning to add to the fun. Evelyn and Lina joined us after lunch for a birthday ritual and three different songs, including a traditional Swedish birthday song.
Pardon any typos as I write from the road. Have a wonderful weekend and K and J, have an amazing trip and congratulations on final adoption steps closing!! What a lucky four you are to have found each other.
Teacher Maddi