Joy School 2010

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Joy of Interest and Curiosity Day 2

Today started off with reading. The children really enjoy being read to. We read Curious George's Valentine Party, and The Berenstain Bears Valentine Party and then Mouse's Valentine Party. Sense a theme here? That's right, we talked about our own Valentine's Day party next week. We decided for our party:
-we would like to invite our mom's
-we must decorate cookies
-They should perform a puppet show without any help (mmm, this will be interesting)
-we would exchange Valentine cards and they should all say nice things on them
-we should have balloons, but not allow them to pop
-and we should have special boxes to put our Valentines in.
After we read all the books, we revisited the lessons from last week and made important decisions.
We tried to sing together, but it was mostly me singing and them watching me, so I gave up on that pretty quick.

We moved swiftly into snack time, making heart pancakes

(shout out to the grandmas for the awesome heart shapes!) Yummy with strawberry milk and fruit.

If your children didn't eat much the rest of the day here is why: This group knocked back 30 pancakes, a gallon of milk, 2 pints of strawberries and a bunch of grapes. They didn't stop there. After about an hour we got out the rest of the salami, cheese a box of crackers and more fruit. They all must be growing! They are really truly Very Hungry Childpillars ;) To work off the massive calorie carbo load we had an extra long outside play time. They used the hula hoops as spaceships and went "flying" through the yard. Then Grandma started pushing the swing, so they all needed a turn at that. They enjoyed the sunshine and exercise for a good 45 minutes. I love hearing their imaginations at work as they "b-tend" stuff.
Eventually, I convinced them to come inside. We all shared our heart necklaces we made at home, and told about getting mail. They watched a short "Elmo's World" clip about the post office.

This mellowed them quite a bit. I think if I had left the DVD on, they would have fallen asleep. However, I showed them the mailboxes we had to decorate for our party and they were all excited.

Usually only one or two of the children take craft time seriously, but this was intense. They were very interested in making a beautiful mail box. They even had a very darling discussion about what their mother would say about their box. Your opinion matters so much to them. I loved hearing their impersonation of their mommy's gushing compliments. Soooo cute.

We managed to squeeze in some learning, and made a list of all the "n" words we could think of, and we practiced writing capitol "N" and lowercase "n" or our supercool chalkboards. We finished the day playing with balloons and sidewalk chalk outside.

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Joy of Interest and Curiosity Day 1: Love Bugs

The Joy of Interest and Curiosity started off all bugged. We read Diary of A Spider and sang Itsy Bitsy Spider. We read Lyla the Lovesick Ladybug and sang Ladybug Fly. It was so much fun we read the Very Hungry Caterpillar book and sang the Butterfly song. We had a very long discussion about bugs that bite and bugs that don't. All of the children are serious authorities on bugs that bite. It was determined after a while that ants do not bite, they just tickle. So we sang Ants Go Marching as we marched into the kitchen for snack.

For snack, I retold the Very Hungry Caterpillar and we tried ALL of the foods the caterpillar ate.

The fruit was a big hit, except for plums. No one liked the plum (it was very sour). Of course, all of the "sometimes" foods were well liked, but no one asked for seconds on any of those. I was surprised! I told them they didn't have to eat anything they didn't want, but if they were curious they could try everything. Joseph wins for trying all of the food. He tried pickles, salami, sausage and swiss cheese. Isabel and Kai loved the salami. Grant had seconds of the sausage, and everyone had seconds or thirds of fruit.

After snack and free play outside in the backyard, we started our craft

While our caterpillars dried we played the question game, and they tried to guess what was hiding in my bag. We talked about feeling curious. They finally figured out I had magnifying glasses in my bag. We went on a walk and used our magnifying glasses to look closely at all the things we were interested in.