Happy Holidays!

My gift to parents is classrooms of children who are busy, focussed and happy to be social with each other, as will be evidenced below - a wonderful sort of advent of our own as the new year approaches just around the corner.

The kids were inflicted with "painting fever" this week!

AND, a sort of "block fever."  We added our wooden "gingerbread" people to some intricate constructions.

Block building takes patience and experimentation as children find what blocks will balance on top of other blocks.  Patience is also required and developed when working on the same building together.  Good job, Jack and Colin!

And, surprise!  Jill brought in "the rest" of her block set, which includes many larger pieces.  She couldn't carry the heavy box on her own, so the kids helped!

One block at a time, down the stairs . . . carefully . . .

Into our wagon . . .

All helping down the hallway . . . 

And into the room!  Yay!  Great teamwork!

After locating my non-breakable ornaments, we also continued to decorate our room.

We read some festive stories.

We added a hat and carrot for the nose (thank you, Colin!) to our paper snow person.

T/Th kiddos made their paper gingerbread people . . .

We took turns decorating a gingerbread house.

We worked on gifts for our parents.

One of the ornaments we made entailed some oven time - we watched as they shrunk!

Hi Sinh!

We were finally able to get outside!

The T/Th loves noting the numbers the M/W gang put up for counting the steps.

Some spontaneous and very involved play acting after snack entailed "going on a train to Japan."

Don't forget Rudolf!

T/Th kids learned how to run in place as we play acted The Gingerbread Man.

Wish you all could have seen how these, once recently parallel-play preschoolers, played SO WELL together here with the cars - lots of great conversation and discussion they had about what their cars were doing.

Molly and Sinh worked on their scissor skills . . .

LOVE the two-handed painting!  Using both sides of that brain!

You have come SO far in these last months, preschoolers.  I am PROUD of you!

Mashed Potatoes and Gingerbread

Before Thanksgiving we smashed potatoes for mashed potatoes with our homemade butter.

Below, see the various ways we smashed the potatoes.

We added pinches of salt to eat them and had some tea too!

We had some fun dumping and pouring some cranberries.  Later we found out that the cranberries float in water!

Happy 3rd Birthday, Molly!

Sometimes we practice making smiley faces on the white board.

This week we began some holiday decorating.

We made red play dough and played with the cookie cutters.

We got outside to check out the leafless trees before the cold set in this week . . .

We began exploring the story of The Gingerbread Man.

We filled in his face . . .

We found him all over the room!

And had hot chocolate with him . . .

We worked together to decorate a paper version, we will make a real one next week and see if he runs away.

Too cold to go out so we brought the snow IN.  Below, we water colored it!

We began writing letters to Santa.

Colin built a house with a cozy chimney.

We found some ways to get some exercise indoors - below, "bowling" and a chase game.

We talked about how to build a snow man and made a big paper one . . .

And then drew our own...

A chilly but BUSY week!