Day Two!

Dare I say it?, I think Day Two went even better than yesterday.

As we did yesterday, we started off the morning with Circle Time, only today the two-year-olds joined us. Simply for logistical reasons, we do Circle Time in the Montessori room (it's the best place to keep the calendar, and because the calendar has 31-plus magnets that need to travel with it, it's not easy to transport... We may rethink this one); later in the day, though, we do our Enrichment activity and Bible verse/story in the playroom, and the two-year-olds get to do it with us. They loved being with us yesterday, so today we thought we'd try to incorporate them into Circle Time, knowing full-well that they would be hard to remove from the Montessori room once Independent Work-time rolled around. Miss D has spearheaded the two-year-olds' day, and she felt confident that she'd be able to extract them with few or no tears. (I hope to be able to bring them into the Montessori room in the coming months, but for now they're just a little too young [particularly my middle daughter, who will just be turning two next week].)

Circle Time was more hectic with them there but still a lot of fun (once again, Miss K did a great job leading them). With only minor gnashing of teeth, Miss D was able to get the two-year-olds back to the playroom to start their activities, and then the three- and four-year-olds got to work.

I worked with Miss D's four-year-old son, my four-year-old daughter, and Miss K's three-year-old daughter on the pink tower and then the brown stair, and then they built a pink and brown tower. (Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get any pics of this.)

My daughter asked to build a maze from the long red rods while Miss D and Miss K's kids were engrossed in yesterday's cutting activity and Miss C's three-year-old son worked on puzzles.

Building a maze with the long red rods


Slowly, slowly...


...all the way to the end!


Miss D's son took a turn


Miss C's son doing the knobless cylinders (is it me, or is he just beaming?:)


Miss K's daughter working with the wooden cylinders


It was interesting to see how she did this work. To begin working with the cylinders, the child removes all of the cylinders from the large wooden blocks and places them on the rug in random order. So far, all the kids I've seen do this have picked up a cylinder at random and found its home. Miss K's daughter, however, surveyed the randomly-laid pieces closely and picked them up/put them back in the wooden blocks in order from left to right.

We spent about an hour on Independent Work, which I hope will expand to an hour-and-a-half as time goes on. Today, though, the kids were ready for a snack; they really enjoy eating together, so we stopped.

Snack time led very well into Enrichment time. Today is Wednesday, which is our PE day. Miss D had great activities planned, including bean bag tosses, hot potato, penguin-walking with the bean bags, the hokey pokey, etc. It was a brilliant, sunny day here and the kids were clamoring to play tag, which they did in the front yard for all of ten minutes before complaining about how hot and tired they were :).

Then it was time for clean up and our Bible verse/story of the week (same as yesterday's).

And that's it for this week - our school meets on M, T, W, so this is a short week because of the holiday. It was definitely a good start, and I'm excited to see what next week brings!