Stories we shared this week

Leo the Late Bloomer is a classic children book. The story is simple and comical.  Leo isn't reading, or writing, or drawing, or even speaking, and his father is concerned. But Leo's mother isn't. She knows her son will do all those things, and more, when he's ready. This story is  for 4-6 year old, but it worked quite well with our group. Evey time when I read  "then one day in his own good time LEO BLOOMED!", our children's faces glowed with happiness and excitement, they raised their arms and shout"Yeah" together. The illustrations of this book are large, bright, colorful and of course beautiful. A perfect book for young children, a self-esteem builder for all ages.

I read it more than 10 times (in Chinese) this week and our children seemed never get tired of it and kept asking for more.

Sweet Potato Pancakes

Study after study shows that sweet potatoes are one of the healthiest foods on the planet. But Children may not like to eat them. In my experience, pancakes can be a good form to increase children's vegetable intake. We served hot sweet potato pancakes on two of our dinners this week, our children really enjoyed them.

sweet potato pancakes in a cast iron skillet

Paper Planes

Paper planes can remind many of us about our own childhood. This week, we made paper planes together with our children. My reference book shows there are 24 ways to make paper planes,some of them can be really fancy, unfortunately, I have no talents to fulfill them. We just made some simple styles and our children decorated them with stickers. Some of paper planes we made fly very well. It turned out to be a good indoor exercise when we were not able to play outside on a windy day this week.

Paper planes

the Theme of Ducks

The fresh yellow color of baby ducks always reminds us Spring is here. This week, our theme is DUCK.

Rubber ducks in the "pond".
To introduce the concepts of float and sink,we provided our children with rubber ducks, rocks and blocks and had them experiment those objects in water. Our children enjoyed this activity and they quickly found out the rubber ducks always floated, the rocks always sank and the blocks can be either way depending on if they were filled with water.

Rubber Ducks in a "Pond"

Duck Cookies
We baked some duck cookies this week and decorated them with yellow icing.

Duck cookies

Decorated with Yellow icing

Ready to bring home

Children craft this week: duck collage

We also listened to the music "Five little ducks", "Counting little ducks (Chinese)" this week.
We learned to waddle like little ducks and mimic duck sounds together.

Crafts: All about Bugs

Lady bugs, butterflies and Bees

We made some colorful crafts last week. They were all cute bugs.

Snail and Bumble Bee

Children love Spring because mother nature always has nice surprises for us. Last week, a cute bee landed on our base ball and a snail stick out his head after a rainy day.We watched them, discussed about their families, asked them about their names and said bye to them. They brought our children a lot of fun.

Say Hi to Baby Bumble Bee

A cute bumble bee

A snail stick out his head

grow Parsley and Basil in small pots

This was the first planting project we did for this spring. After talking about seeds and germination, we had children put 4-5 seeds of Parsley or Basil in the small pots filled with organic moss and soil. Then We helped children add water to keep the seeds warm and moist.

seeds planted in small pots