This blog post is a little longer because I slacked off last week due to a slew of family birthdays and activities. So, this is a combination of the last two weeks of activities. 

We finally had some sun last Thursday after a cold first three days. The children were eager to take off their shoes and enjoy the feel of the grass and sand beneath their feet. We had a simple St. Patrick's day week, with a story about a grumpy leprechaun, and some children also tried their hand at hammering clovers on paper to see a little clover "print". 

It's been fun to watch the children shed off layers and really enjoy the comfort of days with less clothing. They are all so much more skilled in their movement than they were 6 months ago, and their minds are working so intensely with new things to discover outside. They have been experimenting (on their own!) with creating small chutes out of bamboo and little pebbles they find lying around. Our peas are just starting to poke up out of the ground and our newly planted apple trees have just started to have flower buds. 

Some new toys that we have been enjoying in the nursery are our rocker boards. They are bent birch boards that the children in a variety of ways. There are two of them and they are used for rocking either standing up or sitting, or turned over as a bridge to walk or drive toys over, or propped up as a slide. Sometimes the children create a "wall" with them by laying them on their side. They have been a hit and also a wonderful heavy toy to lug around. It's a great tool for open-ended play as well as vestibular stimulation to help children form balance. 

This past week we learned how to do a few tricky things with our hands. We have a little fingerplay for spring which the children LOVE to do together, and it seems so simple but for little hands, it contains many new skills. It goes:

Here is a bunny (hold up a hand with two fingers up)
With ears so funny (wiggle your fingers)
And here is his hole in the ground (make an "o" with the other hand)
When a noise he hears, he pricks up his ears (straighten fingers)
And jumps in his hole in the ground (jump fingers down into the "hole")

It is sweet to see the children try to hold up two fingers, and one realizes that it is a fairly tricky task to hold up two fingers and pin the other two down with the thumb. Even the "hole" is difficult for them because it's not really a fist, but requires all the fingers to be bent and touching one another. Simple fingerplays like this engage both the hand and the mind, and require memory, as they say the poem each day, and careful thought for the positioning of the fingers. These little poems help children to prepare for writing later on down the road, but are fun enough that they request to do them again and again!

I also introduced some screws in a slab of wood. It offers a good movement of turning the wrist while gripping with the fingers. It's also just plain satisfying. 

Outside, the children helped me to replant a fig tree, here's hoping it'll be happy. It was a nice chance to wield their heavy shovels. Also, with such nice weather, our car wash station was fired up once again. Our tow truck business (basically a jump rope used for pulling cars), underwent a little renovation and now consists of a hula hoop looped around the entire car. This seems to be the preferred method of towing for the children now. 

I added a large sheepskin rug to our nursery this week, which I placed beneath our little canopied "house" where all the dolls are. It was interesting that although the dolls have not received much attention, once I put the sheepskin in the house, all of a sudden the dolls came into play! Birds began to nest, children lay down and nurtured their babies, and overall the children took on more nurturing play. 

We've been shifting gears this past week, into Spring. Our songs have included a fun little "jumping jack" poem where we sing "Crocus, crocus open up, and CATCH a sunbeam in your cup!" The children love doing this with all kinds of flowers. We also sing a song that goes "Where are the froggies (turtles, lambkins, brown bears...) when the north wind blows? We do not see them in the ice and snow. Deep, deep, down in the mud (ground, barn, cave) they lie, little froggies with tight closed eyes. When the springtime comes again, little froggies jump (crawl, spring, bumble) about, Oh how happy they will be, a spring time world they will see!" The game incorporates a tremendous amount of movement and is also an exercise in calming down. Occupational therapists are finding that children benefit from games and activities where rest and activity alternate, as it helps them to develop the capacity to control their own excitement and movement. It's a fun way to learn the discipline of calming oneself. In the above game, children mimic the animals resting, and then springing up and jumping around. Then they rest again. We also have been doing a lot of house/fort building during our inside time, and working on making those houses a calmer place from the outside play. Again, creating places and times for calmer play and alternating it with more active play to create the ability to find calm. 

The colder weather this past week prolonged our forest hikes a little longer. We can see bulbs poking their little heads up all over the play yard, but they are not yet braving the full emergence from the ground! The children planted peas a couple weeks ago and they look carefully each day to see if they have begun to grow yet, but those too are waiting. A frequent game during these wetter days is "tow truck", where someone drives their car or bike, and then gets it "stuck" and calls for a friend to tow them out. Often, a friend is happy to play along and help pull their friend out of their spot, but sometimes everyone is engaged in other activities, in which case I have to let the child know to "be their own tow truck". So, they'll get themselves moving again and find a place to get "stuck" closer to a friend and continue the game. And on it goes! I do love seeing how these children seek one another out.