It was Friday

Today was the last day of a somewhat quiet week as some families were away for spring break. Our groupings for the week tended to be mixed ages which is always nice. I enjoy seeing the older children, they always have new play ideas, which helps build the play of my younger ones. As well some of the older children started their daycare experience out in my room as 2 year olds, and it's great to see that they like coming back. We had great weather over the week, and spent lots of time outdoors.

Indoors  our schedule was pretty relaxed. I think the children enjoyed having extra one on one time with me, and smaller numbers of children allowed for abit more involved play for longer periods of time.

These two photos don't do justice to the actual fun we had,  they just show abit of  how things looked during one part of the morning. Often my children have what to the outside might be called a "mess" developing in our room, but to them it has meaning and purpose. It's always great to see when children use materials in creative ways, using blocks and figurines, and baby blankets together for instance. The pictures above show a fairly empty floor space, but more often it is simply covered with cars, pegs, plastic food, dishes, dolls, stuffed toys - you name it. An older friend of mine used to say that a tidy house was the sign of  an unhappy house  - that if you were raising children the house should be messy. I thinks she's right. Mess means kids are busy constructing and learning.

  I added these signs and some large plastic waffle blocks with the cars today. And the children just were really thrilled with these - I hadn't added many new things lately, and although this was pretty simple they loved it. I'm interested to see what else will develop here.

We also started planting our marigolds, in the pots we'd painted some time ago. These flowers were a project for Mother's Day, but we might need to give them more time to grow before sending them home, as we're behind. We have an indoor greenhouse at our center, and the other groups will soon be bringing their plantings to join with ours to catch the great sun from the front window.

Today we stayed indoors for the afternoon as the weather became quite nasty,  with strong winds and much cooler temperature, and I'm wondering about the possibility of snow.