Meanwhile, Over in the Robin's Nest...

6/13/11, 11:03am

6/13/11, 11:52am

Wordless Wednesdays: Still LifeWith Sea Creatures and Matchbox Cars (Plus a Few Aquarium Blocks For Good Measure...)

May Month-to-Month Mural:Sticks

We may have cheated a bit by completing our may installment of the month-to-month mural in

June, but hey, the nice thing about self imposed, arbitrary rules is, no big deal if you break 'em!

Last week, we experienced a bit of extreme weather. We were very, very lucky to be out of the path of the worst of it. We did, however,experience high winds and hail, which left a plethora of sticks and twigs behind.

We decided to take advantage of the debris by turning them into paintbrushes!

From may mural (Hit the "may mural" link to see more pictures)

No Escaping Eggs!

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;

"Hey! Your hair looks like sticks!"

We encouraged the Frogs to bring over items from the classroom to look at with the digital microscope. Here are some of their finds;

I predict that we will be using this microscope a LOT! As soon as we can tear the Frogs away from watching the Robin's nest, that is...

5/25/11

6/1/11

6/1/11

6/3/11

MORE EGGS!!!!

Real Work

Last month, we wrote about the children's growing desire for "real work", especially work that would allow them to use their muscles, engage their joints, challenge their kinesthetic sense, and, like all worthwhile work, give them a sense of accomplishment.
At first, we teachers started to make opportunities for this kind of work in our classroom space...

We added big, heavy, wooden blocks to our toy shelves for large-scale building...

...and filled bottles with interesting- and heavy- things, for lugging around, and adding to the structures that were built with the big blocks.

Of course, we all know that, this time of year, the one place where you can find an endless supply of work is outdoors! With all of the rain this spring, the grass on the playground has been shooting up like crazy!

This looks like a job for a bunch of three-year-olds, who have been ardently honing their scissor skills all winter!

We also had a big project in mind, that would require lots of help. A couple of years ago, a pink, plastic play-house mysteriously showed up on our playground. It turned out that a former student was clearing out a number of outgrown toys and thought that we could use it. Use it we did, until we realized that the Frogs had also outgrown the little pink house.

It was time for it to go in order to make way for bigger and better things!

"Oh no!!! The house got all blown down!!!" was the oft repeated, totally delighted reaction from the Frogs. the got right to work, hoisting the just-heavy-and-awkward-enough-to-be-exciting plastic chunks of house and working together to haul them all the way across the parking lot to the side of the building.

(By the way...does anybody want a slightly used, pink plastic playhouse?)

Now that we had all of this open space on the playground, we were excited to come up with some more opportunities for "real work" to do outside.

Here's where we finally wound up finding our inspiration;

Tuesday Market!!!

After hearing lots of talk from the kids about their gardens at home, and their visits to the various area farmer's markets, we decided to throw out a ball to see if they would run with it;

We set up a market area on the playground!

Their are lots of big jobs for the Frogs to do here! Filling pots with soil and water. Hauling flats of seedlings around the playground in wagons or by hand. Engaging in commerce, (pretend ice cream is the hottest selling item) and figuring out how to work together.

So far, the kids have been really into the idea! At first, they were mostly buying and selling seedlings and flowers. Now that the real farmer's market is starting to feature edible crops, we'll have to get some real produce in there!

Hooray for spring!

Nine!

Yesterday afternoon:

This morning:

Nine peeping chicks!

Look!!!!!

So, I had a post all ready that had absolutely nothing to do with eggs. Really, we have a lot of other things going on...
Then this happened;

...and not ten minutes later, this;

Wow! This little guy works fast!!!
I just peeked in the incubator, and it looks like yet another chick has hatched! They are both peeping away like crazy, almost loudly enough to wake up the napping Frogs. The reason they peep so loudly is to cue the other chicks to get on with hatching.
Should be an interesting morning tomorrow!