This week has been wonderful! Except for the weather..

Thursday, we took a field trip over to NRCCS and enjoyed some singing and story time with Jennifer. She is really awesome and she always has some good books and fun songs to sing. The kids always give her all of their attention.

Today, we declared it Pajama Day AND we made pizza for lunch!
We started off the morning with a baking project: Banana Oat and Chocolate Chip Cookies! We even got to do a little bit of chocolate chip sorting! Baking is really fun with the whole class as its a fun time to use counting and measuring, sharing and taking turns to work together and make something we can all enjoy! We had an indoor picnic to eat the cookies before we went outside to play. 

Before lunch, the kids whipped up some tasty pizza dough and everyone got to make their own personal pizza, which we had during lunch time. We read "Crazy Pizza Day", by Bonnie Dobkin and [illustrated by] Romi Dey. The class enjoyed all the silly toppings that the pizza guy put on the pizzas in the story, but we elected to stick with cheese and pepperoni for our own!

The class loves baking, and we love getting them involved in healthy cooking and getting them excited about eating their food!

Happy Spring Break,  everyone!
-Miss Johannah

The week is off to a wonderful start! 
Our seedlings sprouted like crazy over the weekend and everyone was really excited to see the progress. We also planted beans in clear jars yesterday and we are anxiously awaiting them to sprout so that we can examine the process of a seed lifecycle from bean to plant!

This morning, we had a surprise visit from the NRCCS Kindergarten! They brought home-made toys over to show to the Preschool! There were some really neat projects and the kids were excited to see the really cool toys. I was impressed by how well everyone interacted with and listened to our guests! 

We had a wonderful week learning about worms!
We prepared the garden boxes for planting and planted our seedlings. We learned about worms and how composting works and are very excited to start our own bins so that we can use them in the garden!
During yoga, we pretended to be seeds and growing plants and Miss Alex walked us through the growing cycle and we acted out what happens when the rain and sun come out! And we made a wormy squirmy obstacle course inside the classroom!
Today, we made "worm soup" with homemade brownies and gummy worms!

All in all, I'd say it was an excellent week! The children love worms and anything that has to do with them, so it was a fun time. 

We also celebrated Miss Kerri Ann's birthday this week! The kids had a blast making her a crown, a card and decorating brownies!

We are still following the Decorah eagles, and some of the class made their own eagle's nest out of clay, play dough, scraps or paper and twigs. They turned out pretty neat! The eagle has three babies and is working hard to feed them all. The topic of discussion today was what the eagle was feeding the young. Some answers we received were: "fox," "fishes," "a whole bear!" and "worms."
Thats all for now!
Thanks.

-Miss Johannah

It has been a busy week here at NRP! We have been celebrating Spring!

On Monday and Tuesday, we read some garden books (Diary of a Worm and Vegetable Soup) and planted our seeds! Each child got to count out and plant their very own row! We planted: cauliflower, cucumber, tomatoes, basil, winter squash, summer squash and sweet peppers! They are currently inside in seed planters and we are looking forward to planting them once it finally warms up for good!

Since we have been tilling the garden and getting ready for planting, the class has become very interested in worms! We thought it would be fun to learn about composting and how worms live.

Today, Jimmy Nimock came and showed us all about his red worm compost! We juiced a lot of veggies and then fed the left-overs to the worms! Then we covered the worm beds up with sawdust and we are leaving them for a few days to eat before we check on them again and see the progress. The kids LOVED playing with and learning about the worms. After we had fed the worms and watered them, everyone got to try some yummy vegetable juice! We are hoping to start are very own compost bin in the following week. This way, we can save some of our lunch scraps for our worms and then use the soil they make in the garden throughout the summer. 

Thanks for sharing your wonderful children with us!
-Miss Johannah

Happy April!

We have really been enjoying the wonderful weather and have been doing a lot of outside exploring this week! We started following a family of eagles this past week and so the children have become interested in all things bird. The website for the live-stream of the eagle's nest can be watched here. 
The kids got so excited about eagles that we went outside one morning and built a big eagle's nest next to the playground! They had a blast planning and building and then hanging out in the nest. 

In perfect timing with our bird theme, we have been on the Easter theme as well!  After our egg hunt last weekend (thanks to all who attended and volunteered!!) we used some of the plastic eggs that were left over in the sensory table along with some birdseeds. And, we dyed some easter eggs and decorated them as well. The kids got really excited about blending colors together to make new colors! We brought this idea into our baking theme today when we stirred food colors into our muffins.  

We hope you all have a wonderful weekend!

-Miss Johannah