We had an absolutely wonderful trip to Thistledown Farm this year! It was great to have so many of our parents join us and this made the experience so fluid and fun!!! We had the opportunity to watch our families be together and loved watching all of you get to know each other a little better. The beautiful setting helped us to continue to appreciate the special place that we live and there were so many things for the children to explore and wonder about.

I wanted to honor this experience by giving you all an idea of what may happen with a new material that comes into our room…in this case, the pumpkins and gourds that we brought back from the farm…

We continued from here by integrating the smaller pumpkins into the “Ramps, Movement, and Balance” project as well. In the end, we can understand that a new and exciting material can add so much to our classroom experiences and the children enjoy finding new uses for such simple, natural items

We have noticed that right from the beginning of the year, there has been a growing interest in taking care of our baby dolls. Many of the children have a favorite doll and there seems to be some routine activities going on with the baby dolls…

The children often wrap the babies in blankets, sing goodnight songs to them, rock them in the cradle, or sit with them in the rocking chair, cube, or on the couch (sometimes with a book as well). They also like to try and dress the baby dolls, put on their diapers, and feed them in the kitchen area. Lately, we have also seen many children choosing to take a nap with their baby doll of choice.

It is so sweet to watch these gentle exchanges and the seemingly instinctual desire to nurture. These are daily activities that the children have been doing with their families and teachers ever since they were born and it seems like they understand the comfort and happiness these acts can bring

We plan to see this love of the baby dolls continue to blossom and we will support this interest by providing opportunities to care for the baby dolls by adding materials such as baby food, strollers, and perhaps a highchair to our classroom, and trying out new task such as bathing our babies.

One of our staff members had recently gotten married and donated a large box of silk flower petals to our classroom. The children love them and it has been so much fun watching each child explore in their own way. We have seen them dump, stuff, and pour them from one container to another, grab handfuls and let them float back down to the ground, place them on other friends heads, lay their bodies down in a pile of petals, slide through them, and we have just begun! Our next plan is to add light and shadow to our experience of the petals by using the light table and the overhead projector

We wanted to thank our wonderful Wobbler families for starting off our school year with such amazing support. As part of our Fall Parent Meeting, we continued working on a project that we had started at the end of last year…a mobile to hang up in our room. We wanted to give the adults a chance to work with art materials (something most of us do not find time for in our busy grown-up schedules), the opportunity to explore with their child, create something beautiful as a community, and get to know our Art Coordinator Alison.

It was a fabulous time to connect and we wanted to share some photos from the next day…Alison continued this art exploration in the classroom and the children enjoyed the chance to add some more bead work to our hanging mobile. Notice how much concentration you see in their eyes…watching their fingers as they pick up one small bead, try to put it onto the end of a pipe cleaner, and pull it down to the other end. We also tried to capture the joy the children experienced as they watched Alison add their contributions to the mobile Simply beautiful!