Q is for Queen and Quilt

Another month, another week of preschool. This month I had Q and R. I was super worried for Q and excited for R, but Q was more successful in the end!

Let's see. It was raining the whole time so we stayed indoors:

We first watched QU by They Might be Giants. I couldn't find my DVD, so we watched it on youtube. Thank heavens for Youtube. The kids thought it was hillarious! They all wanted to watch it twice, except Dean since he's already seen it a billion times.

Then we played "Find the Q". I had words taped to my wall and I had them each grab a handful. I drew a line down my white board and labled one side Q and the other side was a Q with a line through it. They thought that was funny. Kids. I had them tell me which words were Q words and then had them tape it to the right side. They did pretty well with the Q at the beginning, but really struggled with q in the middle of the word even though I highlighted the qu's.

The kids proclaimed they were starving, so we had a picnic snack on a quilt in my living room. We ate "Quaker" oat and jam bars that I made that morning. Yum.  We pretended that we were at the park and I asked what they saw. They said they saw bikes and balloons. Then the balloons were popping. Then one of the boys was popping. Then we had to put him back together. Obviously we have a crew of mostly boys.

S was much more interested in the tools than snack. =)

After snack we made a Queen out of the letter Q. I got puffy paints to let them use, but I had no idea what would result. They made HUGE mounds of paint that took hours and hours to dry, but it was still cute. I made crowns out of foam and let them decorate them with sequence.

Since they were already in their "smocks" from art, we played cut the quarter. This was a game we played for FHE growing up. You pack flour into a container with a wider top than bottom and flip it over onto a pan of sorts. Each kid gets a turn cutting away the flour and the object is to keep the quarter up as long as possible. We got 10 cuts the first time, but fewer and fewer after that since Dean was cutting straight into the quarter every turn he got. Stinker. One girl had found my Guatemalan "treasure" in my toys and had brought it over.  So I let them play with the flour and bury treasure for a little bit. I thought it was so cute when one boy said, "This feels nice." as he was running his hand through it.

We cleaned them up and I let them purchase items (mostly discounted Halloween stuff) from my store with quarters. This was a little chaotic. I had the items out where they could just grab them. They were marked with a "price tag" of how many quarters they needed.  If I were to do it over, I think I'd do it more "concession stand" style and have the merchandise behind me. They would have to tell me what they want and I'd have them give me the correct number of quarters. Next time I guess.

That was the whole day! They were all so good and everything went smoothly enough. It was fun.  We didn't even get to the paper quilts I'd prepped. I had squares for them to glue to a paper and holes punched around the edges so they could "quilt" with a plastic needle and yarn. I'll keep it in my "preschool arsenal" I guess.