The playground is open!

After a lot of hard work and a lot of help, the playground is ready for the preschoolers to use. Here are some photos of them playing last week, and helping with putting the new donated mulch in:

L found a worm!

Everybody getting ready to work

Climbing the mulch mountain

L showing Charlotte her worm

Busy digging

Happy to be on the swing set

Happy for a sunny day

The playground still needs some work. We need some more mulch, and some sand for the sandbox.  Please let us know if you can help!

Flubber!

Today we made a cool goopy substance called Flubber. It’s made of school glue, borax and a little food coloring and the children LOVE it.

Adding Borax to the glue mixture

Making the flubber blue

Mixing the flubber

Flubber on a tube

How long will it take the flubber to reach the table?

For more squishy, goopy pictures of flubber play, click here.

Making decorations

On the last preschool day before the holidays we worked on making decorations. First we strung cranberries and popcorn:

Callie the cat gets some more popcorn to string

 

Conner and Niccolo work together

Then we moved on to cinnamon ornaments. The previous week we worked on making a dough from ground cinnamon, apple sauce and glue. Once shapes had been cut, the ornaments were left to dry. Today they were ready for painting:

Hannia made a colorful gingerbread man

Hmm. What color to use next?

Lots of finished decorations

More finished decorations

Even more finished decorations

 

More pictures are here:

Cranberry and popcorn stringing

Cinnamon decorations

Investigating pumpkins

It’s pumpkin season! We see pumpkins all over the place at this time of year – at farms, in books and in long rows outside all the grocery stores. We decided to find out a little more about them.

How much does a pumpkin weigh? We took turns guessing as we weighed each pumpkin.

What does the inside of a pumpkin look like? We cut off the top to take a look.

Scooping out the pumpkin

Ladles and spoons help with getting those goopy stringy insides out!

After emptying our pumpkins we decorated them with Mr. Potato head pieces. We also made paper pumpkins to decorate the wall of our preschool. See more pictures here.

Making yummy apple sauce

Apples are in season! We celebrated by making some delicious apple sauce. Here’s how we did it:

1. Peel the apple

2. Core and slice the apple

3. Cut the apples into small pieces

4. Put the apple pieces into a pot

5. Pour in enough water to cover the apples and simmer until they are soft.

6. Drain the apples and put them in a bowl

7. Add a little sugar

8. Mash the apples until they look like apple sauce

9. Enjoy!

Everyone loved eating the warm apple sauce at snack time! See more pictures of our fun project here.

Our pet snail

We have a number of creatures living at the family center. One of them is our pet snail. We keep it in a box filled with earth and food.

Where is that snail hiding?

There he is!

More pictures of Niccolo and the snail here.

Playing in the sand

After finishing our stepping stones, the children stayed in the garden to play.

Taylor and Angie work on sand experiments in the playset

Plenty of sandcastles!

More playing photos are here.

Making Stepping Stones

To get to the front door of the Family Center, our families have to cross a patch of grass. After some rain it can be kind of soggy and wet! We put down some terracotta stepping stones but they are small and crack easily. Most importantly – they don’t look very exciting! One of the preschool mothers, Ivy, knew that the children could come up with something better. So we decided to spend a preschool day making new stepping stones out of concrete, shells, tiles, marbles and anything else that would look cool.

Ivy and Jack hand out bowls of cement

Colored tiles make pretty mosaic patterns

Everyone is hard at work

Hmm. What can we add next?

Alicia and Joshua work together on one of the big stepping stones

All finished!

These stepping stones are going to look great when they’ve had a chance to dry out. Soon we need to plan a work day to install them in the front yard. Please contact us if you’d like to help! 

Would you like to see some more pictures? Click here.