Half Of What You Hear

I heard a fellow teacher once say "I promise to only believe half of what your child tells me about your homelife, if you promise to only believe half the things you hear about the school day!" I think it's a fairly common saying and it definitely holds true for anybody who works with kids. I'm pretty sure that when parents ask what they did today at school, they get whichever movie the kids watched while I made lunch, and maybe what they ate for lunch if it was something they liked. Of course, we do far more than that in the span of a day, and we hear all kinds of interesting things here too. :)

• I'm on the verge of asking one family if there's an announcement I don't know about due to multiple references to "baby my house".
• One tells me, "I'm broke. That means I have no money. Like my daddy."
• "Can you show my mommy how to make this food? She doesn't cook for me."
  
• In the mammal questioning I'm told a cheetah is a "girl", which leads to a muttered discussion between me and Kanga regarding whether it could possibly mean this or even this, and if those things could have been have overheard from tv. We have to amuse ourselves with grownup conversation somehow. :)
• "I can't clean up today. My head hurts..."
  
• During orca work this morning the orca was compared to someone's grandmother.
  

If you want to ask a few more leading questions of your toddler/preschooler and see if they remember what we're actually doing lately:

• Letter focus on Q and W. Q is "circle with a tail, for Queen and Quack" and we've been practicing reading, recognizing, writing, and sounding it out.
• Mammal discussion continues all month. Major concepts we're learning that characterize a mammal: They have a backbone. They have to breathe air. Baby mammals drink milk with their mommies. They have hair or fur. We're doing a lot of questioning about whether or not something is a mammal. Is Thomas the Train a mammal? Does he drink milk? etc...
• So far we've studied chimp, human, opossum, cheetah, seal, and orca.
  

It Is Possum Day

Really? Possums? All the land mammals in the world and the curriculum people choose the lowly possum? Oh well. I suppose even possums deserve a special day. I'm having a hard time keeping the positive spin on it though. Look, kids! It's an ugly, nasty, ratty looking thing. And also MEAN! So I looked up some cute little possumy clips on youtube to get in a better mood about the silly rodents. The kids and I crowded around the laptop and watched baby possums do cute things for about half an hour. I especially liked the examples of the one playing dead in the yard. :)

Possum eating strawberries

Possum playing dead in the yard

Pet possum after his bath

Once you see the cuteness and carefully avoid any teeth-baring activities, they're not too bad. I do think it's giving the kids a pretty inaccurate view of what possums are really like though. :)

Other facts we learned today:
Possums are marsupials and carry their babies in a pocket like a kangaroo
They play dead when bad guys come
They hang upside down by their tails

And we made a cute art project with a bendy straw for a tail. :)

January Recap

Seems like I just never get to all the blogging I want to do. I'm going to try a once monthly recap to go back and cover anything I didn't get a chance to make its own post. :) Maybe this will be the only month it happens, who knows, but I'll try.

Comings and Goings:

We've had quite a bit more turnover this month than we usually do- many of our bigger kids are ready to graduate and move on to an older program, especially since the new ones we've been getting are tiny.

Ariel and Sebastian have found a new school and are doing well, of course. :) It's very different not to have them around, since they've been with us for almost four years. We got them when Sebastian was just past six weeks old and Ariel was around sixteen months.


I can't believe they were that small! I've basically known them their whole lives. Ariel will be going off to kindergarten this fall. Sniff....

Mulan has moved on as well. She was originally a drop in for the month of September and ended up staying through January, which has been lots of fun. She and O'Malley are very close in age and she gets along well with everyone. Hopefully she'll be back to drop in again from time to time and stay in touch with everyone.

I have had trouble lately getting a good picture of her. She's about to blink. Oh well. Imagine a big smile, because she's got a great one. :)

Esmeralda started at the beginning of January. She is nine days younger than Tinkerbell and it's been really fun to watch the two of them eye each other suspiciously.

Last week we got an unexpected new addition- cutie blonde 18 month old whose big sister is in Duchess's class at school. I'm still trying to come up with a pair of names that will work for them, since I'm sure big sister will pop up too on days off and random summertime afternoons. Little sis still isn't quite sure what to think of us, but she's beginning to settle in quite nicely.


This month we are scheduled to receive a six week old little boy, who dropped in for the day. I cannot remember when my kids were this tiny. I know for sure O'Malley NEVER was.


and before too long I'm going to have to graduate Boo. She's ready for more structured education and field trips and all the fun stuff big kids do. That means probably Sully too since I'm figuring they will want to stay together. So more changes are in the works. It's just the nature of the business...

Curriculum Activities:

January's theme was called Dinosaur Dig and the kids really loved it. The music was incredibly catchy this month and I still find myself singing "Flying Pterodactyl" at random times. We had lots of cool discussions and talked a LOT about herbivores vs. carnivores and what kind of teeth they had. Lilo kept trying to poke in my mouth to find my "meat" teeth and "plant" teeth. We had a couple of fossil digs in the sandbox and even built a volcano.







It was hard to get good pictures of their faces, but they all really enjoyed this.

February's curriculum is called Furry Friends and it's all about mammals. We have a week each to study Land, Endangered, Aquatic, and Nocturnal animals. Should be lots of fun too.

Lunch

I fixed a new recipe for lunch today and it was almost universally a great success. Flik said he didn't like it, but I'm pretty sure that's because he refused to taste it. Lilo also was not impressed. But all the others ate multiple bowls- O'Malley, Boo, Sully, Roo, Stitch, Bianca, Aurora, and newbie Pixie girl I have no name for LOVED it. I love when that happens. So I thought I'd share the recipe~ it's Chicken and Wild Rice soup and we ate the entire pot. Which was huge, even though I left out a couple ingredients. I didn't have any pimiento, although I did throw in a bit of red bell pepper, and no almonds, red onions, or turmeric. But still. Really tasty. Adding it to the repertoire.

PSA

Quick before I forget-

The kids have been really excited about mixing colors and helping me cook lately. I served BRIGHT GREEN biscuits for breakfast. So if you're changing some crazy diapers in the next few days, that would be why. No need for alarm. :)

Mobile Boy!

I cannot believe Sully is already walking. Nine months old and watch out world!! :)

Christmas Slideshow

Every year for Christmas I do slideshows for the parents. Usually it's got one show with all the pictures of their child, and then a sort of "best-of" with a couple pictures of each child so they can see playmates and more of what goes on during the day. There was just a new update to iLife, so I can finally turn them into movies and put them on the blog!

Here's the favorites collection- maybe not all necessarily the BEST pictures, but lots of the ones that make me smile.