the week before halloween was e week. I made a big “spooky” spider web and connected it to the letter e because 1. there is that silly song about the elephants who go out to play upon a spider’s web one day and 2. spiders have egg sacks. masking tape was added all week long. tuesday morning we made mama spider out of packaging paper, masking tape and collected sticks for legs.as the week went on, mama got a white trash bag egg sack and it got filled with babies (made with lunch sacks, masking tape and cardboard legs)!all the babies ended up going home with preschool friends…a tender farewell to mama was negotiated between several preschoolers and the babies. now mama hangs from our ceiling and will wait until next fall to hatch another few dozen babies.

oh e, you tricky letter with so many sounds or no sound at all.

plastic easter eggs inspired some egg work in our journals…as well as a clever “keep your eye on the blue egg” game… a conversation about eggs proved trickier than I thought it would. and then the egg drawing begins…

what I intended to be a friendly direction could have translated into feelings of inadequacy. I know I have the ability to project, to imagine the worst, to create stories before they happen, but as I taped up my first sign, “cut on the lines,” I could easily imagine a large number of children who wouldn’t be able to actually cut on the lines. and it’s not what I meant anyway….I wasn’t asking each child to cut on the line, I was inviting each child to practice cutting on the lines. this is so this is how I teach. projecting, imagining, creating, changing course… all in hopes of empowering and saving dignity…

this year more than others I’m instinctively looking for indoor opportunities for us to use our physical selves. climbing over, climbing under, jumping, rolling, etc. we were gifted a small door a couple of years ago. during d week we used it as a climbing ramp. tucked between a wall and a shelf, with added fabric strips for climbing aids, this was a busy corner!children climbed up the door, made it to the top of the shelf and either climbed back down the ramp or jumped off the shelf (we do that all the time!). someone moved the wooden boat on its side as a “step” down…