Book Review: Snow Is My Favorite And My Best by Lauren Child

I love it when we can read books and see the same characters in short little video shows. Charlie and Lola are a fun brother and sister pair with cute accents and relatable life situations. We enjoyed the book and enjoyed water coloring our own striped hats like they wear. The children water colored their favorite and best stripes, then I sandwiched a Cricut cut out hat on top.

Book Review: The Boy Who Cried Ninja by Alex Latimer

I was having a hard time getting my favorite boy interested in working on letters. So I tapped into his favorite current obsession: Ninjas! We glued cut-out ninja shapes over large letter Nns. He loved it and asked to read the ninja books over and over (there aren't too many to choose from in our large library network but they are all great). 

Book Review: Fortunately by Remy Charlip

I l-o-v-e this book. I never tire of reading it despite how often it is requested. The children love plot twists and it leads to a lot of creative thinking/questions (what would you do?! or what do you think will happen next!?). Each time we read it the children find a different page that really captures their attention- today we drew our own sharks. 

Photos of the Day: {daycare} Selfies

I like to take photos of the children while they are crafting to keep a log here on the blog. Today the children wanted to take photos, too. "Where is the play camera, Mrs. Jessica?" But I don't have one! Maybe Santa will bring one to the playroom this year. I took a few photos of the children- they love to look at the view finder. "Take another one!" and "Don't forget the baby!" were cheered. Kinda like a daycare selfie?

Reunion! Ms. H

Ms. H visited for a daycare reunion! The girls made their own pizzas, made up a few new imaginative games, made crowns,  and uttered the word princess about a trillion times. So cute!

Fall Crafts

We used food coloring and water with cut straw pipettes to make our own apples. "Where do apples come from?" I asked. My favorite answer, "The apple store!"

We talked about acorns this fall. The children see tons of them falling near our park. They are always tempted to take pocketfuls home but I encourage them to leave them there for the squirrels. I cut out tops and bottoms and they matched upper and lower case. 

Then, after hiding some paper

acorns around the playroom, the children glued them into the tree-hide-out for their squirrel to save for the winter.

We talked about pumpkins growing on vines. The kids drew their own crazy vine and glued pumpkins to it. We practiced upper and lower case Pps.

We made these fingerprint turkey prints (thanks for the inspiration, pinterest). And the sort of token thanksgiving gratitude paper turkey.

Sacramento Zoo

Thank you, groupon, for the zoo tickets. I haven't been in so long and it was a great morning. The weather was perfect, the animals were active (except for the 2 exhibits closed for maintenance) and everyone was well behaved. The train ride and carousel were new since the last time I have visited as were the otter and redesigned giraffe exhibits. 

Super serious map reader! He was on a mission to find those lions. Too bad the exhibit had a burst pipe or something- a bunch of zoo workers digging a hole in the ground isn't very exciting.

Super serious train rider!

The gorillas were so close!

The giraffes were so active this early morning.

Lens cap fail, uhg. Bottom of the giraffe exhibit.

On our way out the docents were out with animals to touch. I was so surprised that the children were eager to touch the snakes. This python was very slow moving and meek so I wasn't too worried.