Preschool and Pumpkins and Babylon

This week it was my turn to host Abigail's preschool again. My letter was D, the number was 6, the theme was dinosaurs, and the nursery rhyme was Hey Diddle Diddle. On day 1, after our little show and tell of things that start with D, we counted out six dinosaurs, six ducks, and six dominoes and lined them all up. The dinosaurs were eating the domino playing ducks. (It's kind of hard to come up with things to do with the numbers, I think. That's as creative as I got.) The kids also had a D page to work on and a dinosaur picture to color (I don't remember taking photos of those, but if I did I put them on here. They were just things I got off the internet.) Then we read a couple of books about dinosaurs. They were all fiction books, but they didn't hold the attention of the kids for very long. That's ok, I thought, snack time, I was sure, was going to be awesome. But no. Apparently 4/5 year olds don't like vanilla pudding with bananas. I even carefully counted out six banana slices for each dish. Some of them politely nibbled at their pudding, while others shouted out for all to hear that they thought it was gross. I tried to explain that pudding is a dessert like cake and ice cream, but they weren't going for it.  Well, if pudding didn't win them over, the last activity would. Who doesn't like play dough!!?! That's right. EVERYONE likes play dough. And notice how dough so nicely starts with D. I had the kids at first try to make dinosaurs out of their play dough or anything else they could think of that started with D. This was the winner activity and they worked with their dough right up until it was time to go home. So day one, although it started off slow, ended with a big success. Phew.

Day 2 we focused more on Hey Diddle Diddle. We still had the show and tell time, in which two of the children brought books, so since I am really big on getting kids to listen to and read books, we read them and the kids really enjoyed that. Things were starting off pretty good. Then I had two more books to read following the Hey Diddle Diddle theme. One was actually about Humpty Dumpty - the bad old egg - who sat on top of the wall and shouted to the other nursery characters who passed by, "I'm the king of the castle and you're the dirty rascal!" Until one night a near-blind-but-high-jumping cow and a dog were walking passed with a dish and a spoon. The dog and cow were arguing about who could jump higher and the cow decided it could prove itself by jumping over that moon over there lying on the wall (hint: it was actually the egg.) So the cow jumped over, humpty woke up and fell of the wall and broke, the dog thought it was funny, but the dish and spoon were afraid they were going to get in trouble so they ran away. And the story goes on but that was the part that had to do with Hey Diddle Diddle. The kids really enjoyed it. Afterwards, the kids colored a Hey Diddle Diddle picture that I got online and played until it was time for snack. I put absolutely no effort or money into this snack. I was still hurt about the pudding incident. So we had cheese sticks (cut off my cheddar block from Costco) and sliced apples that the bishop gave me off his tree. The kids LOVED it. Oh well. Apples are better for them anyway. After snack we had a small craft to do before play time. I had prepared 6 items for the kids that they needed to collect off the table - a paper plate (dish), a plastic spoon, and a dog, cat with a fiddle, cow, and moon to color. They colored their little pictures and them glued them onto the plate. They drew smileys on the plate and the spoon and then I hot glued the spoon to the plate. They thought this was really cool. Afterwards they got to play until it was time to go home. One child refused to leave - even after his mother came downstairs trying to coax him out. (I think this means I did a good job.) His mother finally got him out by telling him he could watch a movie when they got home.

Preschool is done for another 5 weeks. My next assignment is just one day - the Thanksgiving Party! That should be fun.

Unofficially we made this week "pumpkin week." It just sort of happened. It actually started about 8 days ago when my lovely home grown pumpkins I had placed on my front door step to celebrate the season were all smashed onto the street, probably by teenage punks who don't realize there are real consequences to their actions. In this case, the consequences included a sobbing little 6 year old boy, a very hurt mother, and a confused 4 and 2 year old. "Why would someone want to smash our pumpkins?" That is a very good question indeed. But that happened the day we went to the zoo so we didn't have much time to mourn.  At the zoo we finished off the last of our pumpkin roll out cookies with orange glaze. I know, I post a picture of these cookies every single year, but I love them. We also made the pumpkin chocolate chip muffins again this week, so yes, I will include a photo of one of those as well. I made them with powdered eggs, so they looked a little different, but they tasted just as fabulous. On Monday night, after the kids were in bed, there was a loud knock on the door and when I answered it I saw 6 brand new pumpkins and a little note saying Happy Halloween! How thoughtful. The next morning I told the kids the pumpkin fairy came to visit in the night and they were very excited. Except now, every night before we go to bed we pull our pumpkins inside for safe keeping. Let's see. The kids also made some jack-o-lanterns and ghosts to decorate the classroom window. Some of the pumpkins and ghosts are "bakers" wearing their "bakers" hats. I don't know how they came up with that, but sounds good to me. We also went to our favorite pumpkin patch. I took photos in the big maze (taller rather than bigger), the kids played in the mini maze, they played in the corn, they climbed the hey pyramid, slid down the slid (Lukas, Kaleb, and I went down the slide together too) and we went on the tracker ride. It was lots of fun and we will probably go again right before Halloween. And for dinner last night we had dinner in a pumpkin. I didn't cook the pumpkin enough so it came out a little stringy and I couldn't stand to eat it - it's a texture thing for me, I need my pumpkin mushy, not stringy - but everyone else thought it was delicious. So there. Pumpkins. (the only things we didn't do but will do later were to roast and eat pumpkin seeds, paint our pumpkins, and carve one of them. Joshua actually wants to be a pumpkin fairy and donate two of our pumpkins to some other kids whose pumpkins were also smashed, but I keep forgetting. That would also be a lot of fun.)

 I forgot to mention they had a haunted house - or more like a haunted trailer from a semi truck. It was cute - but Lukas was terrified!! I only got him through by carrying him and then on the other side he said he never wanted to go in again.

Babylon. You never knew how cool Babylon was because if you are like me, you grew up associating Babylon with worldy sins, which I'm still sure it was full of. But there were also a lot of cool things about Babylon too. The first day we read a very interesting and well written book about Babylon for kids and learned a lot. Joshua did a narration page. And another day read up on Hammurabi and made our own codes. The rule was the code had to follow the pattern of Hammurabi's; They were if/then statements. We wrote ours with chalk on black paper to look like carvings on stone and then the kids drew themselves as king of queen on a top paper. Hammurabi's code was carved into a pillar and the top had a carving of him being given power from the gods. We omitted all false gods in our renditions. It was fun to learn about Babylon because it comes up so frequently in the scriptures, and multiple scripture characters the kids know actually lived in Babylon, like Daniel, Shadrach, Meshak, and Abed-nego, Esther, etc. So that was neat. And there were a lot of things we had learned about before that came back when we talked about Babylon. Babylon was in the same area as Sumeria - practically speaking, so the landscape was the same, they used clay tablets and cuneiform - which we already knew all about - and they still had ziggurats. Also interesting to Babylon is the epic of Gilgamesh. The stories of Gilgamesh is the oldest none written story. I checked it out from the library, but our library days are Fridays so we haven't started reading it yet. Derek was reading another shorter version of "The Odyssey" to the kids, which he just finished, so he'll start Gilgamesh, the Hero tomorrow. I didn't know Babylon was so interesting. I'll still try to stay out of it though.

Abigail's code says "1) If you hear Kaleb crying, then you have to help him. 2) If you make a big mess, then you have to clean it up with nobody helping you. 3) If Abigail turns on the light in the middle of the night, mom cannot turn it off. 4) If you don't do the work then you'll be sent to the dungeon."

 Joshua's code says, "1) If you come in my room then you have to sleep in my room. 2) If we fight with our dad he cannot fight back. 3)If you are not nice to your brother then you have to go in the washroom for an hour. 4) If you make a big mess, then mommy has to clean it up. 5)If someone says a bad word, then mommy has to put soap in her mouth. 6) If mom and dad stay up late, then the kids get to stay up late too."