it happened one night…

Well, it happened again this year…the leprechauns broke into our classroom and left us a mess, along with some goodies, for St. Patrick’s Day!  The children were super excited and spent a good 10 mins running around the room laughing and screaming with delight!  Too cute!  All the green toys were out and had been played with and enjoyed.  All of our green crayons and markers had been used on the green paper we’d had in our room.  And the blue and yellow paint we’d used for our art project had been used and nice green paintings were left on a table.  Not to mention our blocks (which are kept in a green box) were spilled out all over the rug!  Our foam shamrocks that we use for sorting were sprinkled all over the floor!  And two tiny, green leprechaun hats were left in our room along with some green cookies and a shamrock pin with each child’s initial in gold glitter!

After cleaning up the mess they’d left for us we decided to go hunt down those pesky leprechauns to return the hats and ask them why they left such a mess in out room!  And, as you might already know, you can’t go on a Leprechaun Hunt without first making a pair of Leprechaun Finders!  To make our Finders we stapled two toilet paper tubes together, attached some green cellophane to one end and a piece of green yarn to the other so it could hang around our neck, and then decorated them with green markers and shamrock stickers!

After completing our Leprechaun Finders we went on a walk around our school to see if we could find some Leprechauns!  Try as we might, we didn’t see any!  Imagine our disappointment!  We looked in, under, and around things and came up empty!  They children concluded that leprechauns are REALLY good hiders!  🙂

It was a fun day full of excitement!  The children told everyone they saw about how they leprechauns broke into our room while were were sleeping at night and played with everything and left a mess!  And they showed off their pins like they were treasure!  They were super excited that the leprechauns knew their names and put the right letter on their pin!  It was a great day – one we won’t soon forget!

sound the alarm – they broke in!

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!  Today I tried to get to work early today – but it didn’t work out in the end!  Which made me very stressed!  But somehow – everything got done.  When I got to class I put a little pot of gold filled with plastic gold coins in the Jungle (read:  the playhouse) with a note from the leprechaun.  I had found glittery plastic shamrocks (1 for each child) on sale and I sprinkled them around on the floor.  Then, using double stick tape, I taped down little leprechaun footprints.  One set leading to the pot of gold and another leading to our circle time area rug where I had laid some things out.  If I’d had more time, I would have put footprints leading all over the room.

Ms. Bennet showed up at this point and together we rearranged the toys on each shelf, spilled some toys out of their containers,  took out all the green toys and laid them around the room to make it look like they had been played with, and got out some paper and green crayons to make it look like someone was making green drawings.  To top it all off I took our foam shamrocks (which we have been using to pattern and sort by color and size) and sprinkled them all over the tables and floor!  It looked great!  Then I had 2 mini leprechaun hats that I put in strategic areas around the room.

The scene was set.  When I led our class into the room – they immediately noticed the changes!  We asked them who could have done this to our room – and they knew – it was those pesky leprechauns!  So I told them to see what they found as they looked around the room!  They were running looking for things – seeing what the leprechauns had gotten out – they loved the pot of gold!  They loved the glittery shamrocks!  They cleaned up the room – all the while complaining about “Why couldn’t the leprechauns clean up?”  They had a great time!

Later that morning we played a shamrock number game.  I had 20 paper shamrocks (numbered 1 – 20) laid out on the floor in a circle (number side down).  I played some Irish music and they walked around the shamrocks.  When the music stopped they had to pick up the shamrock closest to them and we went around the circle with each child saying their number.  Then we placed them back on the floor (number down) and played again.  When we had done this quite a few times, we helped the children make a number line with all the numbers, counted them, and then called on children to go point to certain numbers.  All in all, a great day!  And each child got to take home 2 gold coins and 1 glittery green shamrock!  And a sparkly shamrock headband we all made today!  Good times!

one day down

I’m tired – and it’s only Monday!  I wish I got a Spring break – I could use one!  It would be nice to have a week off to sleep and rejuvenate!  Oh well.  I knocked out quite a few progress reports today – hopefully I can be done by Wednesday!  That would be sooo nice!  Then I can write final comments on them and send them home on Monday.

Tomorrow I’m going to go in early to set up the the room for St. Patrick’s Day.  I’m taping tiny footprints to the floor and moving things around to make it look like a leprechaun was in our class the night before.  I’m also leaving a tiny pot of gold along with a note from the leprechaun for them to find!  Should be fun – I’m sure they’ll get a kick out of it!  Then we’re going to play a shamrock number game.  I’ll let everyone know tomorrow how it went!  But for now…I’m off to sleep!

blue yellow green

So this week we have been learning about the science of color mixing!  In honor of St. Patricks Day we have been discovering how to make the color green.  The past couple days we have been playing a lot with the playdough I made.  One little boy in my class got so excited when he saw the two colors mixing he yelled at the top of his lungs, “Hey – look at this –  I have green playdough now!  Cool!”  So, they have been slowly but surely making our blue and yellow playdough green – and loving every second.

Today we did a little color mixing at circle time.  I paired up each student and gave each pair a baggie with blue and yellow paint in it and told them to take turns squishing the bag in their hands.  At first they weren’t so sure – so I gave them some encouragement and soon they were squishing to their hearts content!  They were very excited about watching the colors blend and turn to green!  You would have thought it was magic the way they reacted – so cute!

We carried this over into art and started painting with blue and yellow paint.  Even on their paper they goit excited to see the green appear – although one would have thought they should’ve already known what was comming!  🙂  We will proabaly finish up the paintings tomorrow and will continue to play with the playdough the rest of this week and on into the next.  I love seeing their faces light up when something they are doing makes the change!  Gotta love it!

Playdough!

This probably shouldn’t excite me so much because  teachers have been doing this forever!  But today was my first time making playdough from scratch at home and I loved it!  The colors, the consistancey, the ease – who knew?!  Well – probably every other preschool teacher but me.  But now I see the light!  YAY!  It feels so diferent from store bought playdough – much more plyable and smooth.  Just great.

I made a batch of lemon yellow and then I made a batch of royal blue.  I’m going to give each child a little of each color to play with so they can see how it makes green.  Since St. Patrick’s Day is comming up, I thought this would be a good activity to use to show color mixing.  Not to mention build fine motor skills and give them a chance to be creative!  I love playdough – it’s just great!  I really hope tomorrow the children are as excited as I am when I show them the playdough I made this weekend!  I can’t wait!  🙂

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!