Lot's of work underway!

It may appear from the blog that nothing is happening around Little Adventures Preschool right now, and quite honestly it is quite the opposite!  We are spending every day playing and enjoying life!  Today we went to the swim beach and on Saturday we enjoyed the Farmer's Market.  While the boys are sleeping at nap times and night times I'm also very busy working on curriculum planning for the school year.  We are about to embark on the most awesome school year ever and I'm so excited about all of our classes!  The materials I ordered with registration money just arrived, our first book order magazines just arrived, and I'm working on redecorating the preschool room and putting up some hanging art lines in the backyard for tot school.  We are very busy here and hope you'll keep an eye out for all the great new things coming soon!

Tot Summer Camp - Friends

Today was our last day of tot summer camp.  We have enjoyed this version of tot school so much that we are going to continue it through the school year.  We will have 2 sessions of tot school and can't wait for all the fun that will be had!

 The girls loved the toddler pack about friends.  These little pictures of friends were laminated and then taped to an old fashioned "doll" clothes pin.  We enjoyed making them stand up on the edge of the bowl and then pulling them off again!

 CJ played with the feltboard friends.  He made up some funny story about them :)

 Where is the sun?

 Snack time was delicious!  During the growing season all snacks are organically home grown treats picked fresh for snack time.  Today we had beets, tomatos, and peaches.

 A little sandbox fun.

 All of the kids LOVED the friendship beanbag toss game.  They tossed it and handed it and really got into it.  We sang it over and over and over!

 Shadow matching.

 We made friendship bracelets from pipe stems and gluten free puff cereals.  Though intended to be a fine motor activity, only a couple of the kids got it.  The rest just wanted to eat the cereal right away - you would have thought that I didn't feed them snack or something. :)

 Our art project today included potato stamps.  If you've never done this before it is simple and fun to do.  Cut up your potato, push a cookie cutter into it as far as you can make it go, then take a knife around the cookie cutter (while it is still in the potato) and then pop off the ring.  Two stamps in one!

 A couple of the girls were so cute, saying, "up, down" over and over again after I'd demonstrated and helped them figure out how to do the stamps.

Wheels!

We had a fantastic last day of summer camp today.  We got to explore wheels of all sorts, which is just what every child dreamed of doing!

 We used some of our wheels to make interesting looking tracks through the paint.

 And yes, even on our hands!

 The sandbox was full of diggers and dumpers and wheels of all sorts!

 We played with some stickers of wheels on this great big oil pan.  Our stickers even had some roads that we drove some wheels on.  These boys sure loved playing with these little bicycle riders.

 More digging and dumping fun!

 Everyone brought over the water and sand safe wheels that they had, so there were plenty of wheels to go around!  We had a car wash and washed everything we could!

 And just played in the water as well...

 This airplane is coming in for a water landing!

 CJ was also sporting mom's helmet, ride safe!

Tot Summer Camp - Gardens

This morning, as we were getting ready for Tot Summer Camp the boys and I put some googly eyes on socks to make sock puppets.  I didn't want to add any other details to these because I wasn't sure if they would just be taken apart and such when our toddler friends came over.

 The boys really loved them and just had to play with them while we finished getting ready.  I used hot glue to put the eyes on and that seemed to work really well.  They haven't been pulled off yet.

 When our friends arrived it was time to get busy cooking and sorting all of the fruits and vegetables.

 And of course wearing a pan as a hat.

 Part of the tot school pack for gardens includes a sock puppet book of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.  we had fun playing with the story and then the kids tried doing it too.

 Then the sock puppets starting eating the play food that we were playing with.

 Using sticky back, foam shapes, we made many different types of pictures.  I love this activity for tot school because it meets the kids where they are developmentally.  There are kids that can learn to peel the backing off and stick them in a design, kids who need the backing started for them in order to peel it off, and kids who are learning to put the sticky side down on the paper.  Just mastering the concept of dealing with an object that is sticky on one side and not the other was a lot of fun to watch.

 It was also fun to then pull the stickers off of the paper after they were put on, which is just fine too!

 This is what happens when an air force helicopter, you know: the kind that has two copter blades, flies overhead and you are outside with toddlers.  Run for Miss Amanda!

 Lil'GalV discovered that putting stickers in your hair is not very much fun :(

 What fun are sock puppets unless you use them as feet puppets?  They are socks after all.  Lil'GalV started the trend by taking off her shoes and requesting a foot puppet.  The other two followed right along :)

 And then the sock puppets went into the sandbox.

 We practiced "planting" our flowers from the tot pack in the sandbox.

 How cute!

 Another art project we worked on today was glitter glue.  It was fun to rub around and smear and taste (yuck!).

 Anyone know how well hot glue and googly eyes do in the washing machine?

 Another developmentally appropriate task for toddlers is to put items in and out of a container.  Lil'GalS found an empty bubble container and some wands today and played for about 10 minutes putting them in, dumping them out, and repeating.

 I think the kids just know when it is about time to be picked up.  Pick up time is 11:30 and at 11:20 suddenly everyone is interested in riding the bikes along the path.  This happens almost every week! :)

We've had a lot of fun doing tot school with our toddler friends this summer and are excited to continue doing it through the school year.  Look for two different tot classes (Tuesday and Thursday) and follow along with our curriculum at home!  Our calendar of themes can be downloaded here and I'll be posting the weekly curriculum 2 weeks in advance all year longs (I'll also be doing that for Preschool A and Preschool B).  Enjoy!  We have one more Tot Summer Camp next week and then it's time to prep for the school year.