Monday's

Well, the middle of birthday season finds us all very tired and very behind. Everyone has taken a nap, the kitchen counter has been found, and no one starved over the weekend-thanks mostly to Grandma! One more weekend to go and we should be in the clear. At least birthdays mostly fell on weekends this year.

This week's preschool theme is Space. I am so excited to read the books we got! We cheated and read one about Neil Armstrong last week-did you know that he would work 25 hours to pay for one hour of flight instruction? But, the end result was he had an aviator's license before he could get a driver's license. :)

Facts, Terms, and Principles:

1. There are eight planets in our solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
2. We live on Earth.
3. The planets all orbit around the sun.
4. The sun gives us light during the day; the moon and stars give us light at night.
5. We group the stars into constellations; sailors used these to help find the way home.

I am excited about our projects this week. If I can get caught up and organized (ha ha. . .) we will make a planet mobile. Either way, we are definitely going to make our own constellations with glow in the dark stars on the walls. I am still viewing preschool as pretty low key and afraid to make any huge commitments when I cannot seem to keep the house clean for more than a few days at a time. (I made it almost two weeks a month ago! New goal: one month clean!)

Thinking inside the box

We recently received an order from our new favorite place to order Burt's Bees-Frontier wholesale coop. It came in a big box with a lot of peanuts. After taking out all our goodies, I automatically put the box out of Emily's reach until I could properly dispose of the packing peanuts and recycle the box. Then I started thinking, this could be a comparable alternative to a water table. The preschool I did my student teaching at occasionally switched out the water for sand, rice, or other similar things. Packing peanuts might be similar, and if nothing else, they could buy me a few minutes and would be easy enough to sweep up. :) It was a huge success, as long as I managed to keep baby Joe away from the peanuts. . .although, just the box would have been fun, too.
A side note on water tables-they are one of my favorite preschool activities for so many reasons!! They allow children opportunity for open-ended play: encouraging creative thinking, problem solving, early math and science concepts, and the textures are therapeutic for children-how much better can it get?!? It would be pretty simply and cost effective to get a rubbermaid container and fill it with water, rice, sand, etc, and give a child some measuring cups, old yogurt containers. . .