graduation

Summer has arrived!  Can you believe it!  This year is flying by.  Despite my late planning, we made it to our graduations on time, gifts in hand.  I always seem to wait until the last minute to do teacher and classmate gifts.  Always the day of.   But we made it and now it's all over.  Phew!

The sodas turned out so cute for our second cousin!  Hubbs made a drink carrier out of an old box, and we chose two sodas with black lids, in her high school's colors.  I used black craft foam for the hat and yellow embroidery floss for the tassels.

I loved them so much, I decided to use the soda idea again for Griff's preschool teacher.  But I added some POPcorn and attached a note, saying, 'For a very POP-ular teacher'.  My kids LOVED her (Colsie had her a couple years ago).  Every time I mentioned to Griff that he was soon to be a very 'grown-up' Kindergartener, he'd make a frowny face and tell me he's going to miss her.  : (  So sweet!  So I thought it was a fitting gift.  She definitely IS popular in our house.

OH!  And I made an owl bag to put it all in.  ('Thanks for making me wiser') Idea from Lisa Storms.

I wanted to do something small for my boys, to say how proud of them we are, so they both got a pack of SMARTIES, for being such 'Smartie Pants'.  Idea from It is What it is.

He wanted to wear his fox tie that I made him the other day.  I thought he looked adorable!

And, one other cute idea, that didn't make the cut this year- a jar of cookies ('I'm one smart cookie, thanks to you') from Home is Where They Love You.

C is for...

Today was my turn to teach our co-op preschool. There are 6 rambunctious little 3 year olds (and Jack) that come and run around. Its lots of fun, but also stresses me out. As most people know, 3 year olds are not known for their attention span. I want them to leave here having learned something, but sometimes that's really hard.

I had lots of fun today, hopefully, they did too! I love to watch all their cute little personalities interact, and listen to their little (often hilarious) gems of wisdom.

We always let the kids play for a few minutes when they first get here. Then we got in our circle and sang the ABC's. Then we started talking about the letter C.

C is for Caterpillar: We talked about my friend Connie the Caterpillar (using a story from Frontline Phonics with lots of alliteration). We read The Very Hungry Caterpillar, by Eric Carle. Then we made balloon art caterpillars (from here).

C is for Cookie: We read If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, by Laura

Numeroff.

C is for Counting: We fed cookies (Cookie Crisps Cereal) to the Cookie Monster (I found a picture on google images, cut out the mouth, and taped it to a bowl). I would give them a specific number of cookies they had to feed him and then they would use tweezers (the big kind. Mine came from the Bed Bugs game) to put that amount in his mouth. They didn't quite grasp the concept, but it was still really fun.

C is for Car, Cats, CTR, Candy: Next we decorated a letter C with stickers of things that start with C. I was going to have them glue on some of the cookies and little candies (mini m&ms), but they were having so much fun just with the stickers that we decided to fore go the rest of the mess.

We always end with some dancing. We LOVE jitterbug.tv! They have all kinds of kids music available. My kids love to go through and try out different songs all the time. The most popular choice of song for this preschool group is definitely We Are the Dinosaurs by Laurie Berkner.

(The letter C paper and the feeding cookie monster activity came from home schooling activities I've seen Carrie do that I adapted to fit our topic and age group.)