Monster Mush

In the spirit of Halloween, Sam put together a unique sensory experience for the children. She grated a bar of soap, ripped up some toilet paper in small pieces and then added some water as the children helped her mush it all together.

The children loved it and made a wonderful mess enjoying it! It was enjoyed so much that it lasted for a whole week! :)

3/4 Year Old Room Update

We have rounded out our "Fire Safety" theme this past week. We have talked about "stop, drop, and roll", when and why we call "911", and how to stay safe when practicing fire drills, and in case of fire.

We had a great field trip to the Fire Station on Manchester Ave. The fire fighters that showed us around the station were very nice, and patient and answered all of our questions. They let us get into the fire trucks , and they even turned on the flashing lights for us! :) We have pictures to share with everyone, they are all ready to be picked up at the daycare.

We practiced a fire drill last week at the daycare as well. Everyone did a really great job staying calm, and using their "walking feet", but moved quickly to get out of the building to our meeting spot.

We had done all kinds of reading about fire fighters and fire safety. We have also done all kinds of art around our fire safety theme.

We have now moved on to a new theme - "music/musical instruments". But our "fire safety" theme will be revisited soon. We are going to have a fireman visit us at the daycare soon (probably the week of the 7th of October as is it Fire Safety Education week). We are hoping that he might bring a truck with him and will show us his equipment and maybe even let us try it on! ;)

Celery update #4

"Our celery is getting huge!" an excited boy at daycare tells me. I turn to look at it and say, "Oh my, I guess it is!!! I need to take some pictures!"

I just realized as I'm typing this that it will be a month since we started growing out celery tomorrow. Where has the time gone??

It has gotten extremely large in that time - about 8" now!! It is also very robust, we have discovered, as it's been pulled out by the little ones several times now LOL.

In pulling it out we have discovered that our celery has grown quite an extensive root system ( picture to follow as I didn't get one today when it was out, but I will be sure to get one tomorrow when someone pulls it out... Hehe).

Our celery growing experiment had prompted the growing of a second celery- this time we have put blue food coloring in the water. The celery was only planted last Friday and the food coloring was only added to the eater today. As you can see, tube color is already traveling up the stalks and the tips are slightly colored as well :)

Celery update #3

Our celery is continuing to grow bigger each day - tube children are amazed at how big it keeps getting.

The children remind us each day to water it, so we hope that we can grow it into full stocks and have a celery snack soon !!

This picture is our celery as of today - August 29th. About 21 days after we started it. The measurement is a itte inaccurate as we were measuring from the bottom up before (when it was in a dish). This new measurement is only from the soil up as some of the bottom of the stock base is buried...so it has grown even more than the measurements are showing that it has :)

The church burnt down :(

So last Friday, August 17th, we arrived at the daycare (via an alternate route because Church Ave. was shut down) early in the morning to find our power was out. We quickly discovered that the reason was because in the wee hours of the morning The Torch For Truth Tabernacle Church (which luckily, had been abandoned) was on fire. So for everyones safety, neighboring buildings and businesses were left in the dark.

This affected our services, as we obviously couldn't take children into the daycare without power. My son had been at the daycare first thing with us that morning, and experienced the darkness first hand. The other children, arrived shortly after lunch, when we got our power back, were all curious as to what had happened as well.

The next morning the story was in the newspaper. My mother showed my son (who is 4) the pictures , which helped him picture exactly what had happened. He then insisted on carrying the pictures around with him everywhere he went. He would show everyone he would meet and tell them the story about the church that burnt down.

Today all of the children went for a walk up to the old church site - which is now a construction zone. They watched the big back hoe lift the rubble into a dump truck to tow it away. They were very excited to see the heavy machinery at work :).

The pictures below are pictures that I had taken on Sunday, when I walked my son up to see it in person. He had driven by it with us a few times and wanted to see it up close. There has been much activity since then and not much of the rubble remains. In one of the pictures you can see him holding the pictures that nana laminated for him ( because he's a little rough on just plain paper lol).

Out of this tragedy there is an important lesson that we can teach the children - fire safety. The children have now seen first hand how destructive a fire can be, as well as how dangerous. We are going to be contacting the local fire department tomorrow in hopes that they will be able to come in to talk to the children and kick off our "Fire Safety" theme. Since everyone was very excited about the back how they will probably all be playing construction around the daycare and begin a "Construction" theme soon as well! ;)

See a story about the church fire here:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/story/2012/08/17/nb-saint-john-church-fire-556.html

Caterpillars & Butterflies

We went for a little walk around the areas around our daycare on Friday, after our power outage extravaganza ....and we found CATERPILLARS!!

The children were very excited and we ran back to daycare to get containers for them. We collected two caterpillars, along with some of the leaves from the trees we found them in. We are hoping that they will turn into butterflies for us. :) well, maybe moths - either way the metamorphosis is sure to prove fascinating for our eager little minds to watch!

It's an exciting thing to read about it in a book , and even more exciting to witness in person ( as we did last year at the "old" daycare). We will document the progress of this exciting science observation on the blog and will be releasing the moths once they have turned ;)

Stat tuned....

Celery update

Our celery is going strong - its been about a week and a half since we started growing it! As of yesterday (Friday the 17th of August) it was 4.5 inches tall!! (from the bottom of the dish up)

We noticed some roots growing out of the bottom and decided to plant it. The children were very excited to get their hands dirty! We have it planted in a large pot and are going to continue to watch it grow.

We asked the children of we should eat it when it got big and they thought we were silly to think of such an idea - so this has sprung into talking about farming. :). What a perfect topic considering harvesting season is creeping up on us! We will be researching a possible field trip soon ! ;)

Growing celery update

We got back to the daycare today after the weekend to find our celery has really started to sprout!!

The first image is what it looked like before we left for the weekend on Friday ...

The second picture is our celery on day 6! :) (today)

Re-growing Celery

I had heard from a friend about this idea and then saw a pintrest idea about vegetables that you can "re-grow" using the pieces you would normally throw away. I thought this was a great idea for a science experiment.

We had celery and carrot sticks for snack yesterday, so we decided to try and re-grow the celery from the base that was left.

So I explained this to the children. I told them that someone told me we could grow a "new" celery from that little piece we had left. They kind of looked at me funny at first. But when I asked them all how big they thought it might get they got excited and started throwing their hands I the air exclaiming things like "this big!!!" c " no, this big!!" and "it's going to grow up to the ceiling!!!"

This is what our celery looks like as of day 1 when we put it in the glass with water. I will keep you all updated on how it turns out, and we are going to get the children to come up with some ideas of other fruits/veggies that we can try to re-grow. :)

Getting closer....still....

The new daycare opening is getting closer and closer. Excitement is in the air - staff are coming daily to help clean and paint and soon we will be setting up rooms :)

We moved over our playhouse and the rest of the outdoor toys will be moved this weekend as inspections are happening on Monday ;)


Our nursery rhyme "murals" are finished - well two of them....there are more in the works....

Our floors are almost all done and the trim looks makes the rooms look complete and amazing !! :). Peter (and my dad) did a wonderful job!!! So glad to have such wonderful men around to help me out ;)

Can't wait to take pictures and show off the finished rooms !

Getting closer!!!

We are getting closer and closer to opening our doors at our new location on Dever Road everyday. We will have access to start setting things up by July 10th, and before you know it we will have a daycare all set up and ready to play in ! ;)

The ictures I have included in this post are a couple of weeks old now, and more work has been completed since then. I will post updated ones once we can get in there and start to pull things together.

We did move over some outdoor toys that we had to help out play area outside look a little more like it belongs to a daycare ;)

Snow Man

Yesterday we discovered that all the snow we've been getting is finally sticky enough to build a snowman. So we built ourselves a fine, mis-proportional snow man. Which was actually q
uite funny, because Zachary felt the need to point out when he was finished that "his head is too big!".

When you built an impromptu snowman, you need to use what you have for a face/arms, etc. So we used play food for everything - potato chip eyes, a loaf of bread for a nose, and a french fry for a mouth. We will be replacing these things today, or building another snowman with the proper things, as Zachary was also upset that, "the snowman isn't smiling".

Get Blogging!

So I'm not new to the whole technology thing, but I still learn everyday. I use Facebook on a daily basis, and this is how I keep in touch with all of my family and friends, and now I'm going to try to blog daily about the on-goings in my daycare. I figure this is a great way to share the fun new things that we learn and do each day with parents, and anyone else who has a general interest in what goes on in a daycare each day.

Being a community home daycare, it is just me with the children each day. So as much as I will try to post everyday, it may be every other day, so bare with me.

I wonder what new exciting thing we will learn today??