A Few of Our Favorite Things in the OC - Teacher Lisa

As we begin our final few weeks together, we are having fun pulling out some of the kids' favorite things from the past year.

Slime is definitely a favorite, and it was stretched, pulled and squeezed at the light table this week.

The water pumps made a big splash at the tub.

These kids are getting so good at our jigsaw puzzles that we've ordered some new ones! We love to see them working together on these.

Fairies and miniatures are another thing that this class has loved playing with, so there was a wonderful fairy land out on the building table.

We had a new twist on drawing at the Creation Station. We just taped some large paper down on the table and invited the kids to draw and color all over it. They really seemed to enjoy sitting and visiting while they drew all kinds of things.

Of course, there are always cats and other commotion in our dramatic play area! We're really going to miss this litter!

Here are a few more photos of the kids during our free play time.

As our year winds down, we are doing one of our favorite things - a layered self-portrait project. This is a multi-day project that involves drawing a self-portrait with a black marker and then creating layers of skin and facial features over the top of it. The end result is an interactive, "lift-the-flap" piece of artwork. These will be on display in our classroom very soon!

This class really enjoys going outside for scavenger hunts, so we put one together for them on Monday. Armed with clipboards, pencils and checklists, they headed to the courtyard to see how many items they could find.

When they returned to the classroom, some of them made up their own scavenger hunts inside! 

We added butterflies to our Memory Boxes. As usual, many of the children took time to play with some of the other items before returning their boxes to the shelf. The jumping aliens are a favorite!

During our time together on the carpet, we played a beanbag game that involved counting to 20 and passing the beanbag around the circle. We also did a bean bag song, putting the bean bag on different parts of our bodies while we danced and moved.

We are almost finished sharing our adventures with Panda and are looking forward to our special Panda Party. The kids have requested pajamas and stuffies for this and we think that is a great idea!

Throughout the course of the Older Class year, we look for ways that the children can be more involved in the leadership of our classroom. Many of you have seen them blink the lights to announce clean-up time. We have also added leading the snack poem and leading yoga to the list of things the kids get to do when it's their grown-up's turn to volunteer. These sweet kids have come SO FAR!!

Playing together outside is always awesome and it's fun when classmates accomplish new goals like crossing the monkey bars, climbing to new heights, or going down the "fire pole."

As we get to this time of year, each day is bittersweet. We are so proud of your kids and have loved spending the past two years (or one year, in a few cases) with them. They are definitely ready to move on to new adventures, but we aren't quite ready to say good bye!

So here's to our last few weeks...
Lisa and Sheri