Peace, Love and Rolly Pollies

If you have walked down the outside hallway, right in front of the classrooms. You may have noticed an abundance of small grayish creatures!!! Gross!! Well I think so anyway. These small little round things are rolly pollies, or pill bugs I think they are called. Anyhow my entire class thinks that they are the coolest thing they have ever seen, ever! We have not made it to the end of the hallway recently, without someone stopping to "play" with these things. And then if that is not enough, they bring them in the classroom too. They do this secretively hoping I wont notice. This subtleness comes in the form of a lopsided grin and clenched fists, giggles and whispers. My face on the other hand looks more like someone who is about to loose their lunch. :)

So it just so happens that this week we have been studying insects. When I started my lesson, I had the intentions of introducing cute stuff, like ladybugs or butterflies. Not rolly pollies, eww. But after seeing that the children love these things, I decided to add them to our lesson. On Tuesday we went outside and collected rolly pollies. (No we did not keep them!) They had to stay outside because their "moms" were looking for them. Here are some pictures of our rolly polly fun times.

 No teachers allowed!! (Lucky for them my camera has a 36x zoom.)

 These are the looks I get everyday, when I catch them out of line picking the bugs up. Too cute.

Shaving cream makes everything better!!

Every Wednesday morning we have chapel. If the children behave during service then they get an extra 10 minutes or so of free play time. Today they were awesomely good, even better than most of their "good" days. You know being 4/5 years old is not easy. They squirm and giggle and loose interest in things fairly quickly. Speaking of loosing interest.......I have been asked in the past (by a parent), as to why the children never seem to loose interest in me? So here is my answer, I have the constant need to wear something blindingly colorful almost everyday. Now this is never my intentions to say the least, but somehow as soon as I get half way to work, I realize what I have on. And by this time it is to late to turn around to go change. I love colorful skirts, shirts and dresses.And so far so do the children.


Ok back on track we go.......So today I promised the kids we could play with shaving cream. Now this isn't the first time we do this sort of thing. I love shaving cream!! I spray it on the tables, the kids play with it, mash it between their fingers and sometimes faces. They write their letters and names in it. Its so much fun. When I asked the children what was the one major rule to using shaving cream. They answered, "Do not put shaving cream on your friends." So here are a few pictures of the class with the shaving cream fiasco.

Moms Rock!!!

It dosent matter if you have 1 child or 10, motherhood is hard work!!! I myself have 3 boys. Skater Boy is 10, Pajama Cat is 8 and Nator is 3 or Noah, Andrew and Joseph. I opted for traditional Christian names for my boys as opposed to the weird name my mother chose for me. For those of you who only know me as Ms. Juarez, heres a spoiler :( lol.....my first name is Gaynell. You dont hear that one much these days.

Anyhow, I am also a single parent, which I wont go into detail about. Being a single parent is tough, but I wouldnt say its any harder than parenting in general. All moms rock in my book, regardless of your relationship status. :)
                                   So........HAPPY MOTHERS DAY EVERYDAY!!!
Heres to our crazy chaotic households, full of noise, broken colors, sticky fingers, dirty kitchens, too much laundry, love and hugs!!!

Photoscape Fun

Happy Day!!!! I just got my new Nikon P500 yesterday! Super excited and ecstatic, so I brought it to school with me today. All we have been doing all day is taking pictures...ooops. (Ok not ALL day.............ok but yes ALL morning!!! haha)  Anyhow I included a cheesy picture of myself in the mirror with my new camera. If you are a parent or friend that knows me very well, you  also know that this camera has been on backorder for 2 months!! All because Ms. Juarez felt she needed a "red" one instead of a traditional black one....for some odd unknown reason I will never be able to explain. So enjoy the overload of enthusiastic pictures :)

This is my yellow classroom door. Well one of them anyway. It looks so bright. :) Bright door = Bright smiles!!!

This handsome man here was said to have been having a bad morning. Ahhhh nothing some Lego building wont fix. ;)

we laugh..........and we play

Another Tuesday almost gone. :( In recent years I was almost ecstatic at the idea of a summer vacation approaching. This school year, well not so much. Here at St. Paul its more of a family setting than one of a school day. We laugh a lot, and play a lot, learn, and play a lot some more. Since our school is small (very small)  we know all the students names in all grade levels, and every one of their parents. Which in my opinion is a very awesome aspect to student learning. Parent involvement is extremely important. I greatly and admirably appreciate all my parents!!!!

If you walk into my classroom between the hours of  7:45 and 8:00 am....I am most likely sitting at my desk. What!!!??? A teacher who actually gets to sit down you ask!!!??? Ok I sense the shock, but let me explain....That is the only time I get to sit longer than one or two minutes at a time. I ration out my "sitting" in spurts. I have to sit down randomly during the day, preschoolers are very very smart. If I am sitting that means I am most likely "tired" and therefore will not chase them around the classroom. So I sit in the morning, get it out of my system that I will not be sitting much that day (or ever), because free play starts at 8:05 am in my classroom.

And that brings me to my post topic.WE LAUGH........AND WE PLAY!! In order to have a productive day in pre k.........some energy needs to be released as early as possible!!! I tried structured center play at the beginning of the year, and assigned centers, but I ended up throwing that all out the window. I now allow them to pick there own place to play in the classroom. We laugh and we play in hopes that we will all find out who we are as children and maybe as adults as well. :) Ms. Juarez

Free Painting

What is "free painting" you ask??? :) Well sometimes doing the same stuff gets boring in my classroom. Yes I understand we need to learn the required alphabet and phonics for learning. But sometimes we just want to get messy and paint something. I dont know about you!!!! But I absolutely despise being told what to paint lol. I want you to give me some paints and a brush and walk away!!! :) So here in "my classroom" that is exactly what I do. The children are given some paints and a brush and I walk away. They can paint anything they wish (being in the parameter of awesome and fantastic) as long as they give their painting a title. Today I had some far out titles......for example "Windy Day", "Running", "The Big Bad Wolf" just to name a few. Self expression in my opinion is the very important in preschool. How will we ever know who we are as a person if we cant express ourselves freely in everything we do? Some might find this next part disturbing.......but in my classroom there is no such thing as "staying in the lines" or a "red apple". If you want to color your whole paper blue, hey more power to you child!!! If you want to color that apple with every color in your box...........WOW then I might think your the most amazing child ever. So hey heres to all of us that never colored in the lines. Who knows, we might be teachers someday. ;)                          Ms. Juarez 

Busy Bees............

We have been working very hard in my classroom these past couple of months. And I have not had time to post any pictures of the children. Also my camera broke :( I took some pictures of the children in December and will be posting them soon..................