we’ve been watching the calendar.  today we checked the computer.   we looked at maps.  and….

punxsutawney phil saw his shadow!

so we took some crafty little puppets (groundhog printable glued on old cracker and cereal boxes with a craft stick hot glued on…thank you ms hanna for your factory-like work in getting them ALL cut out!), colored them brown (or any other color of choice) and took them out for a shadow hunt!

we made holes from tires and climbed on in too.  we were the groundhogs!

we did read a factoid that phil’s weather predictions have only been right 39% of the time.

so, if you don’t want 6 more weeks of winter, then you might be in luck!

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we also did some indoor shadow dancing play, but i was too involved to take any photos…tomorrow i hope!

it was ten years ago today that a fire broke out in our church basement also known as preschool classroom, kitchen, storage, library.

i was still on maternity leave with micah, reeling from a previous miscarriage and generally feeling like i couldn’t do it all.  then there was the fire.  it was quite a journey.  with a lot of gratitude, i’ll walk into work today.  ten years later. smiling and stronger and sure of community.

we have our own photos to share and our own stories to tell, but while those are waiting, here is what our local newspaper has to show:

(click on the photo above)

thank you, ms wendy!

hee hee hee…one of our very own preschool baby dolls was on the news!

my friend, christy, is the director of the SIDS network of kansas and they needed a doll for one of their news segments.

much to our delight (and confusion!), we watched our doll on the news!  we looked at the calendar to try to understand better that the doll was picked up on monday morning, driven to wichita, went to the news studio for the recording session, driven back to newton, and dropped off at our preschool on tuesday morning.

you can watch it too:

(click on the above photo)

we got a double m out of a project this week by using old editions of the mennonite magazine for cutting and gluing into capital M shapes!

there were varying techniques.

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we practiced m writing along with pointy and bumpy mountain line shapes.

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we cut and taped map strips into map mountains.

we have more maps waiting to be used for our field trip headbands!  thank you, friends and families for the donations!