Picture This!

Happy April 6th! Y’all, we made it. It’s finally spring! The weather has warmed up nicely and, of course, the rain has begun. But, spring is that wonderful time of the year when flowers start blooming and we begin planting our garden!

As with last year, we are partnering with Grow Appalachia to plant and maintain a community garden and it’s such a valuable experience for the children. They love getting to spread compost around the plants, starting seedlings, helping choose what we plant and where we plant it, and harvesting when things are all said and done. It’s such a magical thing to watch a tiny seed poke out of the ground and grow into a grand plant that then produces cherry red tomatoes you can eat straight off the vine. And, because it’s a community garden, our produce will be available to the community!

A corn cupcake for Tillie’s first birthday, courtesy of Miss Amber’s class!

Another fun event that occurred recently was the birthday of our chicken here at Miss Amy’s. Her name is Tillie and she recently turned 1 year old. To celebrate this event, all of the kids wanted Tillie to have a birthday cake, like they would have on one of their own birthdays. That said, we knew that it wouldn’t be a great idea to give her actual cake, so we made our own little corn cupcakes. We then frosted them with plain yogurt and topped them off with some leftover strawberries. And boy did she love it!

Just like any other 1 year old, she got cake all over her face!

Lately, we have been doing a lot of experimentation with painting and the use of different brushes. Sometimes, we need to use a certain type of brush to produce a certain type of artwork, to get across the picture inside our brains. And I must say, it’s been working pretty well. With the choice of which brush would be best, the children are producing some amazing paintings.

We have also been having great success with melty beads too. For the first time since this group has been at Miss Amy’s, they are finishing whole melty bead designs and I’m having to melt 5 to 8 different creations each day. They are blowing it out of the water! I’m so proud! Even Miss Amber got in on it and made a lizard out of melty beads!

And to wrap up this posting’s brief overview of art at Miss Amy’s the past few weeks, we also had a station where children could make little chicks from toilet paper rolls. Using tissue paper, they could put “feathers” on their chick, and a little orange beak and feet, but I knew long before I ever put the supplies out that I was going to get some really strange looking chicks. Aren’t you glad this isn’t what actual chickens look like?!

Oh! And before I forget, we also “tasted the rainbow” a few weeks ago! We did this really cool science experiment where you “melt” skittles and they create these rainbows and then you can eat what is left of the skittles and drink the juice. It was such a big hit at school, that a few of the kids actually went home and did the experiment again!

I promise it’s not science fiction, but I’m not sure I would believe it if I hadn’t seen it happen!

All in all, it’s been a great beginning to spring here and we are looking forward to a fun and very busy April. If you’d like to see more pictures from the past two weeks, you can find them here. With that, farewell! Until next time!

~ Miss Kt, Clubhouse Kids Teacher & Atelierista (Art Teacher)

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Picture This!

It’s a wonderful day in the neighborhood, a wonderful day for a neighbor. Oh, would you be mine? Could you be mine?

Holidays are magical times for children. What lasts a mere twenty-four hours for us adults goes on for days and days in a child’s life. There is no Valentine’s Day, but Valentine’s week! I’m actually still not sure it’s over… But, it was fun!

On Monday, in preparation for Valentine’s Day, Miss Amy made some amazing homemade angel food cake with a ton of eggs that we got from our lovely chicken Tilley and I worked on making little heart shaped pizzas with the kids.

They were incredibly tasty little treats and a great way to start off our Valentine’s week. Oh, and before I get too carried away, here’s a picture of our chicken, Tilley. She is very sweet and the children love to feed her leaves and grass and she happily gobbles them up.

On Tuesday, Valentine’s Day, we had fun eating the angel food cake Amy made and picking our handmade valentines out of the box. We also had some brownies and fruit salad and all in all, it was a day of much sugar and much love. I apologize now that I don’t have more pictures of the events I speak of, but it can be difficult to step back and photograph when you are in the moment, enjoying it, helping the kids.

Wednesday and Thursday, we continued making valentines for each other, coloring hearts, and we retained our focus on compassion and love. On Friday, we made adorable heart shaped cookies for snack and everyone ate far too many of them. I may have made more than necessary though, like 30 more than necessary. Oops!

Throughout the week, we also had a “Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf” provocation which encouraged the children to try building with different materials, such as straw, sticks, and “bricks” or Legos in our case. It also gave them the opportunity to play and re-enact the story while simultaneously crafting their own new stories with the same familiar characters.

I so desperately wanted to call them the three little bears and the big bad mouse, because my ability to make spoons look like pigs and a wolf was laughable. Thank goodness for the powerful imagination of a child!

Over the past few weeks, we’ve also has a grand ole’ time with feats of engineering, from building ramps – jumps included- to digging tunnels, to intricate games of “Don’t fall in the lava!”

It was quite a good week! And with that, I bid you adieu. I promised myself I wouldn’t write a crazy long blog post this time and I’m sticking to it! That said, I still want to be able to share photos and stories of some of the fun things happening at Miss Amy’s, so I created a photo album where you can explore more photos from the past weeks and all the weeks to come! Just click here: More Pictures! Happy Sunday y’all!

~ Miss Kt, Clubhouse Kids Teacher & Atelierista (Art Teacher)