Bird Houses and Gingerbread Cookies

This morning, the girls and I started out with a couple of our favorite songs. Annika did a beautiful job with the "We never hit or kick or push" card and following her rule throughout class. Today, we talked about the color white and read a poem about all the different things around us that come in the color white. Imani noticed that our joy school house is white, and Ava pointed out that clouds are white. Next, we played a guessing game about animals and Annika did a great job of identifying types of animals when given their physical descriptions and habitats. After our guessing game we acted out some of the animals we had discussed. This game was particularly popular, as expected, and Abby had a great frog hop :).
Our big project of the day was our bird houses. I was impressed with how focused all the girls were on this project. Each of them took their time choosing colors and they seemed to really appreciate the purpose of the houses (they took turns making "tweet, tweet!" sounds, which I took to mean that they grasped who would be visiting their houses!).
We had snacks of gingerbread cookies, milk and apples and finished the morning with some songs on the piano and free play. My favorite story of the day came from free play time. Abby found a jack-in-the-box and was sitting next to Annika and attempting to make jack appear. Annika noticed that Abby was having some difficulty and said, "Abby, do you need help?" Abby said yes and Annika said, "Here, I'll hold it and you turn the crank" (wow, where did she learn the word crank?). When Abby continued to have some trouble, Annika offered encouragement, saying "Keep going Abby, you're almost there!" Together, the made jack appear.
We had a great time together today and Ava and I are looking forward to Tuesday!