Arrrrh!  Ahoy thar, matey!

After getting inspiration from the book, How I Became a Pirate (below) last week, we embarked on some nautical activities, as well as some treasure troving.

We followed a map that led us to a big "X" under the slide!  We dug under it and found our treasure!

Later we perused Jill's large collection of maps and drew our own.  It is good to practice drawing x's - good for crossing the midline!

TREASURE!!!

We took turns playing in our boat made from our big box - we also began learning boat parts like port, stern, starboard...We enjoyed re-hiding our treasure for each other.

After looking through another book about pirates we decided to make our own gold doubloons from salt dough.  We cut them out using all different sizes of round lids.  We noticed from the pictures in the book that doubloons were all different sizes.

When they dried we worked hard to paint them...

A math activity we tried this week was rolling dice and identifying the face of the dice on paper - below the children help each other.  Good visual discrimination practice as well as counting.

In beginning some water activities, Elliott started helping me fill the sensory table, one cup at a time!

He realized if he filled the cup up all the way it did not take as long...

We kept track of how many cups it took by drawing a line each time - Zoe and Owen helped too.  We used 38 cups!!

Then, we did some floating and sinking experiments.

We sorted which items floated and which sunk.

At the end of the week we made homemade tortillas.

Outside it was warm enough to explore the water, pouring and dumping, using the funnels and water wheel - the kids were very engaged here.

A busy week!

Spring Cleaning and Child-Initiated Activities Show the Growth of the Season!

Above, the seeds we planted outside are finally sprouting!

Zoe and Elliott found some puppets and had fun trying each one out.  We made houses for them.  Below, the polar bear puppet is taking a nap.  This week was filled with the children playing quite harmoniously together, initiating activities like this one, on their own, while I observed, facilitated or joined in.  This ability for the children to initiate play together, on their own, and imaginatively is a wonderful perk of preschool progress this time of year.  

We also engaged in some spring cleaning out our water table! The kids helped dig out the sand from out bird's nest and then we scrubbed it out together.  Above, Karsten cleans the dinosaurs.  Good teamwork!

 

An activity we enjoyed this week was "table bowling", where we aimed balls down the green line to knock down some paper towel rolls.  The children modified the game by using cars to knock down the rolls later...

Another day we got the idea to make giant drawings of ourselves!

Kaden spontaneously brought in a bag of pistachios and we had fun opening the shells and eating lots of them!

(Another good fine motor activity.)

 Last week we collected lots of branches on our walks and this week we began painting them beautiful colors!

We read a fun book about pirates and this initiated some fun pirate play.  We used a big box as our boat and made spyglasses from the paper towel rolls.  We looked for treasure outside.

Above, someone left us a new play thing outside that we enjoyed exploring and we began some outdoor water play.  Below, the children continued to have lots of fun in the flour!

And we drew big flower tops on some pre-drawn stems on paper taped to the wall.

The children played together so nicely this week!  A nice accomplishment towards the end of a year.