We have caterpillars! The eggs that we watched a Black Swallowtail butterfly lay in the garden a few days ago have hatched and the little caterpillars have begun eating the leaves. Hopefully our weather will stay mild and be better suited to their growth than last year's hot summer. If so, within a couple weeks we should have a few big caterpillars to catch so we can watch them transform! ...And, we finally got our first taste out of our garden! There were lots of beautiful snap peas ready for us to pick today! We learned how to tell if the pod is ready to be picked (fat, not skinny!), and we learned the best way to pick the peas so that the whole plant doesn't come with! None of the peas actually made it to the house, though...they were just to delicious to save! :)
We got to watch a Black Swallowtail butterfly lay some eggs in the garden today! And so the cycle begins again! We are all excited for these eggs to turn into tiny little caterpillars, so we can watch them grow and change as we have for several years now. I think this might be the first time we have gotten to see the egg portion of the life cycle though, so that was new and exciting. If you would like to read more about our adventures in caterpillar-raising, click here!
Today was a great day to play with anything cool so we got out some colored ice cubes that I had been saving. The kids had fun laying them out on some of our tree rounds, watching the colors melt together, noticing how quickly they melted in the sun, ...burying them in the sand, ...and even adding them into their mud mixtures!
Our cold, wet spring has put us a few weeks behind, but we finally got MOST of our daycare garden planted today and had lots of fun doing it! We still have a few things to add over the next couple of days because I wanted to make sure those that weren't here today can get in on this too. Today we planted carrots, peas, green beans, corn, sunflowers, and some tomato plants. We still hope to get in our lettuce, spinach, pumpkins, a couple more tomato plants, and some potatoes in the next couple of days. I have had so much fun learning right along with the kids! This will be our first year trying potatoes, so we'll see how that goes and what we learn from that! :) I also set out a box of dirt with some of last year's leftover seeds and gardening tools for the kids to play around with and they really enjoyed that, especially after we had finished the "real" planting. Hopefully the forecasted rain will help out our new garden and we will get some warm weather to help it grow, too. I really love watching the kids see their seeds grow and getting to harvest their vegetables, too!
I'm a little behind, but have been wanting to share what we did for Mother's Day this year! I think the kids really had a lot of fun with it, and so did I! Together as a group, we mixed up our own bath salts to give to mom... in both lavender and chocolate scents! I got the "recipe" here. Whether making them or using them, bath salts are a great sensory activity for kids! A great texture, and so many scent possibilities! We also made our own soaps. The kids loaded a bowl full of glycerin soap bars, and I melted them down in the microwave. Then they added lavender scent and the colors of their choice. After it had cooled and set, the really fun part started! The kids used cookie cutters, a wood block, and a hammer to pound out flower and leaf shaped soaps! I hope the moms enjoy their gifts as much as we enjoyed the process of making them! :)
In case anyone has noticed the lack of posts here lately, here are the beautiful tiny little toes that have been keeping me on mine! :) Our group has been enjoying and adjusting to having two infants and we are very busy! Hopefully we will find our new rhythm and I will get back to sharing our fun with all of you soon!
I have discovered something. Maybe discovered is not the right word, since I am far from the first to realize this, but it took me a while. In most cases (there are exceptions, of course) the LESS prep work I do, the MORE the kids get out of our experience. This realization has completely changed the way I do things, and the results we get because it is pretty much the opposite of how I used to run my program. Take today for example. Thanks to our recent tree-damaging ice storms, my dad brought us some great new tree rounds to play with! They needed a quick sanding, so instead of prepping them the night before, I set out the box of un-sanded tree rounds and some small squares of sand paper. Each of them gave it a try, and a couple of them sanded off and on for the rest of the day! Call it child labor if you want, but the kids love to be involved in the process! ;) Sometimes they even enjoy the preparation more than the actual final "activity" I have in mind. Not only do the kids enjoy it, but it also gives them a deeper understanding of whatever process we are involved with, which only broadens their learning. Now, I am looking forward to seeing what they might build with the blocks tomorrow!
Today is APRIL 18th. And this is what it looks like outside our windows. Yes, snow is wonderful. Yes, we love to play in it. But, yes, we have had enough. The kids are so ready for warmer weather that we have had the vast majority of our imaginative free play consumed by thoughts of swimming! So, today we had a "Pool Party" day inside. I turned up the heat a couple of degrees and the kids all spent the morning in their swimsuits! We pretend- sunbathed (don't worry, we even got out some sunscreen first ;) )... ...pretended to swim a little... ...had lots of beach ball fun... ...and even planned, predicted, and observed sinking vs. floating while we played in the water! We also read a book that was perfect for the occasion! It has been a day full of fun and imagination! :)
 Color, color, color! The two weeks leading up to St. Patrick's Day were filled with all the colors of the rainbow around here. We did lots of painting and color mixing (I provided only the primary colors and we discovered what happens when they mix together!) to make a giant rainbow, in hopes that it might bring a leprechaun to hide his gold here!
 And it worked! :) We had a mischievous leprechaun stop by and turn our milk green, and he even turned the toilet water green! He also left us some fun surprises: a "pot of rainbow" and some green glow bracelets! He left a note, so we learned that his name is Sneaky O'Malley!
 We had lots of other color fun too, like our baking soda and vinegar play, with red jell-o powder added in. An idea that came from Footsteps In Growing Daycare that we had a lot of fun with. When the kids were all done playing with the bubbling reaction, we used the resulting mush to paint with. It left an interesting textured product that smelled wonderful! :)
 We also had fun with flubber, and a new-to-us sensory material: Rainbow dough. We have made cloud dough before -- it consists of flour and baby oil. Since the only moisture comes from the oil, when we added colors one at a time, they didn't mix together but stayed separate as we played to become rainbow dough! It is shown here after we had only added green, but Play Counts has some fun pictures of the dough with all colors added.
We had fun with rainbow strips of paper available in the art area all week,
 ...and our new rainbow sensory bottles! We also learned a couple of new songs that you may have been hearing at home! If not, ask the kids to sing you the Rainbow song, or the Leprechaun song that they learned!
 We even got to EAT a rainbow with these colorful rainbow fruit kabobs and explore new and fun green foods, like avocado.
 We worked together to build a tape rainbow and then used it as the base for our rainbow color scavenger hunt! Some of the kids are really getting good at ripping tape off the rolls....such HARD work for little fingers! But they are very motivated to learn how, so they work, work, work at it!
We had so much fun learning and playing with colors!
In anticipation of St. Patrick's Day, we have begun talking about leprechauns and rainbows and have decided to try to gather as much rainbow color as we can over the next two weeks so that maybe a leprechaun will come here to hide or find his gold! :) We have started with the color red, so today the kids really wanted to make RED flubber (they like to call it "slime"). We added in some pieces of red yarn and some cups and spoons and the kids spent the better part of the morning building a wide variety of "leprechaun traps" as they told stories of what they would like to do if they ever meet a leprechaun. :)
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