I Survived!

My co-worker, J, and I approached our first week of summer days with a fair amount of trepidation. We came in early and on week ends to prepare and hoped that this effort would pay off in the end. Now, with the first week of working ten hour shifts behind me, I can safely say that I was pleasantly surprised. Not as frustrating as I thought. Not as crazy as I thought. Not as many complaining children as I thought.

There are still quite a few bugs to work out of our daily schedule and I'm still going in to work today, on a Saturday, to prepare for next week. But, this week was proof positive that sometimes hard work does pay off.

Here are some of the projects we worked on...

J put together these matching bins for busy bags, sunscreen, library books, and extra water bottles.

 

J painted these tables with chalkboard paint.

 

We made this play kitchen out of an old sand table. The children love it!

 

A web for the summer on our chalkboard. We'll add activities we have done on it through out the next couple of months.

 

 

The planning sheets that we developed. When planning, we fill out one of these for each day and then make observations on it for future reference.

This is not something we made, but some of the children found it and decided to utilize it as a lemonade stand for every Thursday at our local park. I am so proud of these guys for all the hard work that they did and will continue to do through out the summer!

There is another large group of children who are forming a fort club. I hope to facilitate the construction of a permanent fort structure of some kind before the end of the summer. But until then, they are loving making mini forts out of branches and twine in a little wooded area we have access to. I may post more about the "club idea" later.

More about the last week...we took a trip to the library, played outside in the rain, participated in large group circle times every morning, had a picnic in the park, played with moon sand and dressed up.

 

 

See ya! I'm off to plan next week!

 

~ Amelia