girls...around the room

These two are best friends...they love each other and hate each other.....today they played without one fight!! They made a fort here....
are reading to their babies and playing 'night time'
and reading, reading, reading!!
Loralei wanted her quiet time :)

around the room....

stacking....Jake is stacking everything...as he should :)
Setting up a train....I love trains!
Bug blocks and shapes....open ended play

around the room

I went to the store to purchase a bunch of hooks for the dress up clothes and they were 3.69 a piece!! I needed 20! Soooo.....I looked and looked and came up with this. It works even!! I have also changed things up a bit. I will post some of the messy room later.







Off to the left is the new circle time board...that will be next weekends project....

Random around the room.....

Every couple days I need to figure out something new to hold my lil Quinns attention. Today, pom trees! hahaha....I thought this was a pretty darn good idea myself. :)

Addy and Hay were sitting in these chairs and started pretending that they were putting on seatbelts. WAIT!! I have some seatbelts!!! Korina velcro'd them to the back of the chair and boy were they a hit!! now we have a train (or whatever else they chairs may be) legally!!! :)

I put these bristle blocks out about 2 months ago...and they still aren't tired of them!

My favorite little blocks...Lunch time for the snake....mmmmmmThis rope on the climber never gets old. Jacob is helping up a friend!!I love my drums!! Worth every penny!Loralei loves to wear these on her head. The are the dancing scarves turned head wear :) we wear them too! They are kneeling on these groovy little satin seats I got in Spokane....I only got 3 (a tad spendy) but would like to invest in having one for each kiddo at circle time!!An old client brought by a box of random things....these masks are a hit!!!!!!

Around the room....

Different Blue's and Purple's at the Easel.....

Brian is using the patterns on this book to create his own differnt pattern out of the pattern blocks....

Bev asked about the new science area....this is it...uh oh, a banner fell...I will post better pictures next week so you can see it's entirety....

Awww....Gremlin squeezes!!!

bunnies, string, and fire.....

Awww....I know, cute!

The other day I was putting some string away and Quinn said in the cutest little boy voice he could find; "Annie, can I have a piece of that string?" Sure Quinn, I said...and the imagination began.

Of course they asked Quinn where he got the string and the ripple effect had begun....Everyone 'needed' string...even the 15 month old.

Bryan and Quinn were working hard and pretty soon they were 'fishing'. They 'built' fishing poles and fished. I am not sure what the chairs had to do with it all...but they were catching some cool stuff!

Here, they are casting their hooks! Later...they needed a fire. To cook the fish of course...so I headed to the closet of odds and ends and got some red tissue paper. "Great!" Bryan said..."This is just what we needed!" Bryan started building his fire.It's a hot one and more wood was needed!Sooo...where there is fire, there is the need for people to put the fire out and who better than the local firefighters.

I love when play is an all day thing. We started out with string and ended with firetrucks....with a whole lot of learning (via, language and risk taking) in between!!Over in the science area I added some big circle mirrors and plastic 'fall' items including leaves, pumpkins, and nuts. They are great sorting items. Loralei especially loves it over here and has a fascination with the sparkely things...the mirrors especially. She uses the mirrors alot...and yes, they do break. One actually broke today, but we just picked it up carefully and threw it away. She now knows you can not kneel on the mirror....we do not let the babies in this part of the room :)

Around the room....

This is the area of our room we call the 'Messy' room. This is where we paint. We have painting, a sensory bin, the light table/craft table, the big blue table, the writing table, the playdough table, and the science area. We just addded snails...I will post that in a bit. On the big blue table we are painting with baby calf nipples. I got the idea at conference and purchased them at the Grange...which is our local farm store.

In the sensory bin we have flax seed. I also got this at the Grange. If you haven't used this before it is very cool to the touch. Later you can try adding oil or water for a totally different experience. We added silver tins and cups and a bunch of plastic Spiders. And yes....I use food. Kids do not get confused about playing with food and eating it. I remember playing with Oatmeal as a kid and I never associated it with the Oatmeal that I ate. I certainly never ate dry Oatmeal....or uncooked rice, or uncooked colored rice or noodles or flax seed. ewww. So yes, we play with food...it's cool.

My kiddos LOVE magnets. We keep them out or have them easily accessable at all times. These are big black magnet sheets with little containers, colored block magnets, clear colored magnet rim pieces, and chain. The chain is especially versitile and they love it!

The days following a Costco run are always good for some seriouse box play. I had 3 large produce boxes and these guys are surfing!! Yup surfing. Bryan has the stance down good.....

and then they needed to lay down and paddle. Loralie is doing the full crawl stroke!Our little ones LOVE to read! Yes, it is upside down, but she is chatting away about apples. The kids love to build and lately we have been asking them if they want to draw what they build. YES! They do, and Bryan is very careful to make sure that all his blocks are represented. The kids are practicing and learning good pencil control and this is also helping with eye hand coordination. Here is Addy using some of the materials that were on the Magnet boards. She liked to do this on the blue table. She is patterning and creating shapes.....Korina and I cleaned out one of my 'sheet' closets. Oh boy did the kids have a good time with all the unwanted sheets. We used clothes pins to pin everything together to make a fort. Here we have corn painting...This is the decorative corn that you can buy at the grocery store. Sometimes they get their hands painty just so they can wash them! :)These two were up here for a good amount of time. They are standing on one of the benches. I am not sure why they didn't just pull down the containers...but it was a great place for them to play with their horses/animals. We made this building 'blocks' using old baby formula containers. I added colored paper and pictures of the kids or animals and then put contact paper over them. They can build these up taller than themselves...and they make a LOUD noise when they fall...that is the most important part.