In the jungle…

The children are really enjoying our jungle!  I hear constant growls and monkey sounds coming from the playhouse corner.  Or I hear people on safari looking for animals to take pictures of – they look sooo cute and are all having a blast!  And that’s what really counts – they are experimenting with props and taking on different roles.  It’s just great.

We had a class discussion today about what our favorite wild animal was and why.  I recorded all their answers down next to their name and posted it on the wall for parents to read.  Most of the children said safari or jungles animals – which didn’t surprise me.  One boy said a bear – which was cool.  But my favorite answer was given by my youngest little girl:

Ms. Elliot:  “Sweetie, what is your favorite wild animal?”

Sweetie:  “A unicorn!”

Ms. Elliot:  “A unicorn?  I see…”  (I quickly debated if I should tell her that unicorns don’t actually exist.  But I decided not to because this will probably be the only time in her life she can give that answer.  And she is just sooo cute and happy with herself because she is the only one who gave this answer!)

Ms. Elliot:  “And why is a unicorn your favorite animal?”

Sweetie (in a very serious and oh-so-proud-of-herself voice):  “Because they can ride on rainbows!”

I couldn’t help but smile!  I loved this – and she was sooo proud of herself!  It’s moments like these that remind me just how much I love young children…  🙂

Happy Kids = Happy Teacher

So, no one at work had any kind of Saint Patrick Day book for me to read to my class.  What a bummer.  I’ll have to try to get to the library.  Luckily, the children didn’t remember all the questions they had – so we didn’t talk about it today.  We did talk about wild animals – and boy were they excited!  I also read a book about safari animals that has some neat photographs of African animals.  That got them really excited!

They have been asking to play with our oatmeal table (I made it using an under the bed storage container) for a couple weeks so today I got it out.  I put our plastic safari animals in it for the children to play with as they explored the oatmeal.  They loved it!  I had forgotten how fun this activity can be – so I plan on keeping it out for the rest of the week – maybe longer.  I wish I had space in my room to keep it open all the time – but I don’t.  It was funny because the children kept calling it “sand” even though I kept reminding them it was oatmeal!  Go figure.

I also finished making our jungle today – so I’ll open it tomorrow!  The children are very excited and I am eager to see how they use their imagination!  It looks really good and I got quite a few compliments from the parents about how creative it is and how good it looks.  It’s always nice to be acknowledged by the parents and to know they appreciate what we do.  🙂  All in all, another great day – we had a class full of happy kids which made for a happy teacher…and now it’s on to tomorrow…

We’re Making a Jungle!

Today was a surprisingly good day.  I’m optimistic about the rest of the week.  I say this because Ms. Bennet is gone all this week on vacation – so I was a little weary about how this week would go – but so far so good.

Today at circle time I mentioned that March had St. Patrick’s Day (when I introduce a new month – I like to go over special days within that month) – and none of my children knew what that was!  I was pretty surprised…they had lots of questions!  So, I plan on going over some more St. Patrick’s Day info tomorrow – I had wanted to go by the library today – but I didn’t make it there.  Hopefully someone at work has a book I can borrow that tells about St Patrick’s Day in a very simple way.

I had planned on introducing this months theme today – but as you can tell we got off topic.  I had planned on doing a Safari theme – but then we got this cool idea of turning our playhouse area into a Jungle!  It’s almost done and the children are excited!  So I guess our new theme is Wild Animals (or Jungle/Safari).  Whatever – it’s will be fun!  Who doesn’t like animals?!  So I’m pushing back introducing our theme until Wednesday – hopefully I can get the jungle done by then – but it’s looking cool thus far!

I get a lot of fun out of changing our playhouse area into different scenes.  It’s been a beach area, a farm, a restaurant, an office, a camping site, and now a jungle.  Oh, and a house of course!  It’s fun and it keeps the interest level high.  Lets the children be able to really take on different roles and experiment with different props.  Would love to do a castle one day and maybe an igloo for when we do weather or even something space related like a rocket ship for when we do our space unit.  We’ll see what happens…time will tell – but right now we’ll have fun in our jungle!