Preschool

It's been a couple weeks since I started my job teaching the 4 and 5 year olds at the preschool. I love the challenge of thinking of a theme for each week and activities that the kiddos can do that will keep them busy. The first week we did foam nametags, paper airplanes, and mystery bags pertaining to the five senses (that one was my favorite). I put objects in brown paper bags and the students had to use their senses to figure out what the object was. Seeing was chopsticks, hearing was uncooked pasta, smelling was a clementine, feeling was fluffy balls, and tasting was animal crackers. It was hilarious watching the kids try to peek without me knowing. They had a lot of fun.

Week two's theme was butterflies. So we all started out as caterpillars and by the end of the week, we had been wrapped up tight in our chrysalises and emerged as beautiful butterflies. The caterpillars were made out of construction paper and resembled an accordian. The kids' favorite part was taking pictures for the chrysalises and butterflies. I also happen to have (randomly) a light up butterfly made out of strands of fiber glass. They loved watching the butterfly change colors. We also read a couple books about caterpillars who wished they could fly and amazingly get very sleepy and wake up as beautiful butterflies. (Aren't kid's books so predictable?:)

This week's theme is spiders. Since we went swimming on Monday, today was our first day of real class. We talked about what we already knew about spiders and then I explained the different parts of a spider (huge abdominal part, head, 8 legs, and 8 eyes). The kids were amazed that most spiders have eight eyes. Our activity was making a spider web by weaving yarn around a paper plate. Surprisingly, most of the kids did fairly well at navigating the weaving from letter to letter. They also enjoyed learning how to tie a knot.

I keep meaning to write down the funny things they say but keep forgetting. However, one day AJ was flexing his muscles and started kissing his shoulder instead of bicep. That cracked me up. The hardest part has been forming relationships with some of the younger kids to the point of them listening to me. One little guy is especially hard to "encourage." I've found he enjoys cars and knocking over block towers so we do that a lot to keep him from bothering all the other kids.

That's about it, except last night I went frog-gigging (soft g) with Matthew, Kristy, Luke, and their friend Dustin. We caught three frogs but I accidently let one get away from me. I offered to hold it so Luke could use his gig (its like a trident with four little prongs) again, but the frog was still alive and jumped out of my hands. I was not expecting that. We ended up catching two more and decided to use one of them. So Dustin cleaned it up and froze the legs until we get enough to make frog legs YUM! I haven't had them since I was about 6 or 7.

Dodge