Our week started with Valentine’s Day activities and morphed into hats and mittens projects, with a smorgasbord of Free Play choices. I hope your children enjoyed opening their Valentine’s bag. The teachers all enjoyed opening theirs. For the first time this school year, our classroom had full attendance. Sickness, appointments, travel, or late starts seemed to constantly interfere but we reached this milestone on Monday. Our class is very busy when 14 children are in attendance. Hopefully, we will continue the year with little illness and continue to frequently have full attendance. I admit I’m ready for a nap when I return home from MWS.

You can see the beautiful hats and mittens the children made as they decorated our bulletin board. As the decoration appeared when they used watercolors to paint, the white design would appear and I told them it is ‘magic.’ It’s actually a white craypas decoration but they couldn’t see it on the white paper.

Rocket ships and astronauts were under the loft and your creative children placed the on the red chairs as the launching pad. They enjoyed playing with cats and mice, and hopefully the cats kept the population of mice down.

Magnetic tiles are always a favorite and we borrowed mini magnetic tiles from another classroom. Our Circle Time visitor was Eyore. Some of the children knew this donkey from the Winnie the Pooh books. Actually they knew them from movies. I don’t hear many children say ‘books’ anymore. See how fast you can sing “Hee Haw Eyore, Hee Haw Eyore, Hee Haw Eyore, Hee Haw Hee Haw Hee Haw.”

I have written before about a Circle Time activity when a felt character is hiding behind one of the colored houses and the children must guess where. For example, the mouse hides behind a house, one child at a time makes a guess, and we all chant “Little Mouse, Little Mouse, are you hiding behind the (color) house? When I lift the house, either there’s excitement because the mouse was found or a communal ‘no’. On Friday, instead of a felt character, a little picture of Mrs. Reiss hid behind the houses. The children had fun guessing where Mrs. Reiss was. But one time, when I lifted the house, it wasn’t Mrs. Reiss hiding there, it was Mrs. Wiryaman! You’ve never hear such laughter and amazement coming from the children. It was magic! All was well while Mrs. Wiryaman hid a few times until suddenly I lifted the house and it was instead Mrs. Dotivala. Once again, laughter and amazement from the magic.

Enjoy the Presidents’ Day holiday weekend and vacation week. I’ll see you the week after.