here are some favorite memories of mine on this fun, fun day!  you can bet we’re going to make some new memories today!  and you can bet i’ve washed out some glue and paint containers in preparation!

back in 2009:

the teachers looked silly (oh, why didn’t i get a photo of ms. viliya in her pajamas?).

there was bologna and peas waiting at the play-doh table (funny).

the letter of the week turned back to A (funny).

the calendar and the music said it was christmas again (funny).

the paint was edible (but i didn’t tell them that at first. instead i pretended the only funny thing was that we were going to finger paint. then i suddenly licked the paint! oh, wide eyes).

there were fake moustaches (funny)…really these are just strips of fake fur with a roll of masking tape.

but the best joke of all was the coffee cream in the cleaned out glue container (funny!!!).

a.w.e.s.o.m.e.

(if i could have turned the light green this week i would have…instead i just did it to these photos)

well, way back when it was st patrick’s day it was also u week…and i was determined to make a connection:

a leprechaun likes gold, the pot of gold is at the end of the rainbow, rainbows come after rain, in rainy weather you use umbrellas!  yeah!  st patrick’s day –> u week connection!

we had a leprechaun around and he was tricky all week.  he left us magic cups that turned our water green.  he left droppings that we could eat (green tic tacs and m&ms)!  he would mess move our shoes around!

(really it was a drop of green food coloring hiding in the bottom of the cup, but wow, we tricked them good!)

the glue turned green which was perfect for covering our little wooden pots.

after getting covered with glue the pots went in a brown bag of green glitter.

after a few shakes the glittery green pot was ready!  now we just needed gold!

so we built a leprechaun trap.

i’m happy to announce we DID trap him a couple of times, but he snuck out before we saw him.  he did leave some droppings and a clue about where the gold was.

yes!  we found it outside!

some of us kept looking for him…he could have been ANYWHERE you know!

so what do you do when a retired kindergarten teacher grandma gives you HUNDREDS of mardi gras beads?

well, you find tubs and assign colors to them using a piece of paper…and you sort!

and you sort.

and you pick up as many as you can at once.

and you get on the table so you can reach better.

and when mardi gras is long over and your teachers move them to the hooks you hang them up.

and when mardi gras is even further in our memories, you use some green ones to make the leprechaun trap even trickier. (more photos of this to come!)

and most importantly, you wear them.  proudly.  several at a time.  no matter how old you are.

oh, and everyone can take a bunch home.

thank you, grandma lois.

well, there are no photos of us actually DOING this project…that gives you an idea of how springy crazy it was in the room.  but, the end result was just as fun.  those turtles got a lot of action in the room.

we used little rocks from the playground, green liquid paint (and then food coloring when the liquid paint ran out), a paper base of head and legs, coloring with crayon, drawing stripes and shapes with permanent marker, teacher hot gluing eyes and body/shell together…the turtles were born!  we watched turtles hatching from eggs on youtube too.  pretty cool.

and we had a dad come for show and tell (and the whole morning) since his name started with T.  he looked JUST like a turtle hiding under that green blanket. : )

mr. lennon’s-dad-toby also helped build the TALLEST TOWER of the school year.

can you believe this tower lasted through the next two days?!?!?

(trust me…the kids really were having fun…maybe i just took too long focusing the camera)

march 7-11 was severe weather awareness week.  that was easy to tie in to T week.  first up:  thunderstorms and tornadoes. we started and stopped music to coordinate scribbling (emphasis on SCRIBBLING) to.

(and then we used the magic eraser to get our textured tables clean)

after scribbling time we cut a tornado shape from our paper, duct taped a donated plastic stick to the middle and it was tornado time!

this demonstrated perfectly that a tornado is “just” wind.  and when you concentrate really hard and get your tornado going back and forth really fast…there is wind!

you can almost feel it, eh?

in our conversation about thunderstorms we also revisited the concept of “chunks” with T+H:

here is T, here is H, pound them together:  THHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

(and did you know that dry erase markers wash off skin really easily?  i didn’t until this week)