The Frog Blog: June 2011

Remember how excited we were when we happened upon the Robin's nest, right when we about to start incubating chicken eggs in our classroom? Remember how impossibly serendipitous the arrival of those four little blue eggs seemed? Remember how, about two weeks ago we dropped all mention of the Robin Fledgelings as soon as the chicks showed up? Well, here's the behind the scenes story of where all the blog posts went after the chicks hatched. Bonus points! It's totally cohesive with the whole "things that come out of eggs" theme!
The weekend after the eggs hatched, I discovered some more eggs. Unfortunately, these ones were on my daughter's head, and my head too. Yup! Head lice! (Are you itching yet?) Now, I've been in this field long enough to know two things;
1.) Lice are bound to cross your path when you have kids. they are not really harmful, but they are a GIANT pain in the butt!
2.) As a teacher, no matter how much I want to go "Ewwwwww" when I see a bug that grosses me out, if I cave into that primal fear in front of a child, then chances are excellent that that same child will freak out every time they see a bug from that point forward.
So, rather than blogging that week, I spent a sizable chunk of my time combing tiny bugs and eggs out of my kid's and my own hair, plus bagging and laundering more items than were strictly necessary from a scientific standpoint. Ick.
Two positives came from this experience; First off, I now know that my "no freaking out about bugs" philosophy has panned out, at least when it comes to my own kid, since she asked to see every single thing I combed out of her hair. "Mama! That has six legs! That means it came out of an egg, right?" (Hopefully, that explains my aversion to blogging about eggs for a while...)
Second, it provided a fantastic opportunity to break out a new item that we purchased with our Terri Lynne Lokoff Child Care Foundation classroom grant money;

Meet Zoomy! Our new handheld digital microscope!

This thing is AWESOME! It hooks right up to a computer, fits perfectly in a kid's hand, and allows them to view and photograph images of up to 40X magnification.

(It also gives teachers who have lice related P.T.S.D some peace of mind, when applied to one's scalp.)

We broke out Zoomy and demonstrated how it worked to the kids. At first, I was concerned that they might not make the connection between the image on the screen and the object that was being magnified, but it became clear that was not the case when we heard their reaction to this first shot;