i come from a long line of people who can make something out of nothing…nothing out of seemingly everything…see redemption in almost anything… get teary at the simple re-telling of meeting a stranger, telling each other, “hey…there’s a sermon in that…”, i’ve also been told i can blow sunshine up places not appropriate to mention here…and i know i can spin reality to a level of decency that it doesn’t deserve…but it comes from a genuine place.  so when i watched this clip of a video from last week, i noticed my little friend in the orange shirt.

she doesn’t see herself, it’s clear.   other children are discovering themselves on the screen, making eye contact with themselves, laughing, dancing. she looks to me, worried? i can see you, i tell her. then 21 seconds into the video and…she sees herself!

i can’t help but make something out of it…thinking of times i felt like that, wondering where i was and who i was when the world around me knew already, wishing that we could all find ourselves and that when we did, we’d express such joy.

happy sunday, friends. let this child’s joy at finding herself lead you too.

 

get ready, there were two WHY oh WHY oh WHY have we not done this before moments last week.

so, when i realized it was National Coffee Day and it was C week, we painted with left over coffee. we have done that before. back when we were making our treasure maps (AAAARGH!).

i moved one of our real coffee pump pots over so I could easily refill the cups with more coffee. that was fun.  using real coffee mugs for the coffee…funny.

…………………………

and then…oh mama. stroke of genius number one:  we moved a pump pot of water over for the colored water and marker station.  awesome.  of course!  great idea.

they could refill with clean water, color it, mix it…awesome.

but that pales in comparison to stroke of genius number two:

……………….

i watered down the left over coffee (so we had more), got rid of the worn out markers, quickly emptied out a cream container, mixed up some white paint and water and WOOOOO-EEEEEEEE…we had some coffee play props.

what, you’d be afraid that someone might drink it?

someone did. but the paint was non-toxic and she claimed, “don’t worry-i like coffee.”

we had a little school family conversation about the fact that i didn’t make a plan with families to let them drink coffee or paint that day…so no more sips.

these are the moments of my job i love.

i saw it first on pinterest.

it was better than i thought.

markers-new or old- dipped in cups of water makes an amazing sight of color.

the color bleeds out, mixes with others, saturates a little vessel of water.

one common technique among all classes was to add a marker to a cup, then leave.

guess what happened?  brown and black.

and we all know that BROWN AND BLACK ARE BEAUTIFUL COLORS!!!

 

 

well, we jumped on the bandwagon that has been rolling along for quite some time and we used low temp glue guns.

this joined in the category of “things we can do at preschool that you might not be able to do at home.”

like many have reported, the children knew the silver part was hot, they knew the glue was hot, they very successfully glued blue or brown wool to their sheep bodies for a funny sing-a-long of “baa baa blue sheep” and “baa baa brown sheep.”

:: :: :: ::

they also used the best $19.99 tool i’ve bought in a while:  a 2 inch circle hole punch.

it’s a bit tricky, but so satisfying!

 

so here is a sneak peek into what happened when a group  of kids found the computer set up for recording a birthday celebration…