4 years, 11 months/2 years, 9 months.

Will and the boys made the bold move to go to the Atlantic Center Chuckie Cheese on a Saturday.  It looks like it was a good decision.

4 years, 11 months/2 years, 9 months.

While I was skiing in Utah, Graham was play-dating it up in Brooklyn.  

Therese's e-mail of the week, entitled, "Magic beans":

Dear parents,

We started our week re-reading our retelling of The Three Little Pigs.
Everyone took more turns telling until the story finally happily
ended. Of course, the children wanted to act it out. We did one take
and decided to do more later. We talked about listening ears, walking
feet, and indoor voices while acting out the story. Some of our
students are such dramatic actors, deeply feeling the parts, that
others actually feel frightened.

We retold the story of Jack And The Beanstalk with the children's
help.  Each person got a small bowl of magic beans to glue to black
paper. We wondered if when we returned the next day, there would be
beanstalks growing in our classroom. Some students assured others the
beans were not really magic.

In the big room that day, a few giants were seen running around our
beanstalk jungle gym.

We reviewed our How To Be A Good Friend list. The class reminded each
other that good friends: share, listen, clean the floor, and hug. We
all agreed that hugging and kissing was the opposite of hitting. We
talked about using our words instead of hands. We talked about how
baby chicks use their voices too to ask their mama hen for food or
help.

Number 1, 2, 9, and 10, cracked on Monday morning. The rest cracked on
Tuesday. After waiting for them to fluff up, we moved them to the
brooding box, reviewed our chick rules, and set to petting.

Quiet time has had four to seven sleepers. And many quiet readers.

We read a retelling of Jack And The Beanstalk. We talked again about
the difference in pretend and real, and how some people are such great
actors they can scare us. We also talked about talented illustrators
who draw such great ugly ogres and giants that we get scared. After
the story, we went in the big room to act it out within an obstacle
course that a couple of children helped set up. We balanced, planted
magic beans, slept while they grew, crawled, crossed the stage and a
bridge, climbed the beanstalk, took golden eggs, and chopped down the
beanstalk to prevent the giant from following us back to the big room.

Suki, Ruby's pet bunny, came to school to meet the baby chicks. It was
a regular farm. The children were as quiet and curious as the (other)
animals. The children held, cuddled, and pet the baby chicks at drop
off. Then again during free play in the big room. And again after
quiet time. The baby chicks survived the love. Farmer Becky picked
them up Thursday to go live happily ever after on the farm.

Mieke (Mee-kah) tumbled in on Thursday for our first Lava class. The
children were tumbling like crazy after she left. They rather seemed
to enjoy it.

We worked on our Jackson Pollock mural for two days. Dripping,
tapping, and flinging paint onto our previously white paper. We read
Olivia and examined a Pollock mural in the book before we began. Who
is our inspiration for the painting? we asked. Someone shouted,
"Jackson Polish!"

Next week we will continue preparing for our art opening. The gallery
will be open on Wednesday, February 10th, from 8:45- 9:30am. Parents
are invited.

See you all on Monday,
Therese

Snowbird and Alta

 My jet-setting month continued with a great trip to Snowbird and Alta with my Dad, John and Michael (Peter was there earlier in the week).  Despite being extremely sore (turns out, I was in better shape the last time I went skiing, 7 years and 2 kids ago), it was wonderful to get on the snow again and spend time with my brothers and dad.

Thank you, Dad, for organizing and paying for this trip, and thank you, Will, for taking care of the kids so I could go!  Pretty soon we can attempt to get all 4 of us on skis.

4 years, 11 months/2 years, 9 months.

Getting back to our normal routine...sort of.  Snowmen and snowball fights with Luda, and chickies at Graham's school!

4 years, 11 months/2 years, 9 months.

Julia challenged Granny Annie (aka Mary Ann) and me to the ultimate test: could both we and the boys survive a week together? YES, indeed! We had a fine time. Graham discovered preschool crossword puzzles and mastered iPhone solitaire. He read/recited all of a Curious George anthology  very many times. After assembling a car kit that his Uncle Michael had sent, he conducted scientific experiments addressing velocity and mass.

Connor tackled some pretty tricky puzzles--while I was supposed to be helping, it was very unclear  who was helping whom. He was also busy with his race track and tiny animals and sometimes even let me play, too. Happily, we distributed many mini-chocolates in response to excellent pees (and rare poops).

The only moments of absolute silence were when Grammy was turning on the TV. Armed with 4 pages of instructions from Will, I tackled this task with dread and great concentration. The boys totally knew that whether they got to watch The Gruffalo Child, etc hinged on my success. 

The great blizzard of 2016 struck while we were visiting, extending our stay until the airports reopened and Julia and Will got back (driving) from Miami. Lots of fun "sledding" down the "mountains" across the street, i.e. the parked cars. We slid on bottoms, not sleds, moving on to the next mountain when we could make out the current one's color.

And then MA and I retreated to Florida to recuperate while the first team of Mama. Daddy, and Luda took charge again. Or maybe Graham and Connor continued in charge, with a fresh staff?

Therese's e-mail of the week, entitled, "Sticks and stones":

Dear mamas and papas,

We began our week reading four, yes four, versions of The Three Little
Pigs. The children compared and contrasted, recalling each story and
its many differences. When sharing about the books, we are practicing:
using our words to describe details from our seats, listening to our
friends, taking turns talking, remembering, recalling and retelling,
using our sense of sight to look at pictures and compare,
comprehension and analytical thinking. These are social, cognitive,
and pre-reading skills hard at work. Afterwards we made sculptures
using materials similar to what the three pigs used. Gray clay from
the Earth combined with hay, sticks, and stones. The children made
robots, houses, gardens, an incubator, and more.

Make that six versions of The Three Little Pigs. We made a chart to
look at the differences. We realized that the wolf is bad in only half
the stories, while the pigs are bad in others.

We also retold The Gingerbread Man and each person got a gingerbread
cutout to color, add glue, and make swim through a river of rice and
cinnamon. While they laid on the riverside to dry, we ran around the
big room.

After reading The Princess And The Pea, we worked with model magic to
mix colors and make tiny peas. We then used our tiny fine motor skills
to string them into necklaces. It was challenging but everyone worked
and stayed focused.

Friday morning we baked bread. Some of us turned the oven on, some
poured ingredients into the bowl, some mixed, one person helped read
the recipe, others put the bread in the oven and took it out when we
smelled the scent of freshly baked bread. We all ate the bread with
the butter we had made, and leftover apple butter. Yes, it was yummy.
Afterwards we read The Little Red Hen. And An Egg Is Quiet. Our eggs
are very quiet but we are expecting some noise on Monday Monday.

We started a retelling of The Three Little Pigs and will finish it next week.

Have a quiet blizzard!

Costa Rica: Manuel Antonio

We spent the second half of our trip in Manuel Antonio, which is a somewhat more developed area built on the ocean and cliffs alongside a national park.  Our villa had an amazing view, an air-conditioned bedroom (!) and in-room massages (!!).  A macaw seemed to live in the tree outside our room, and there were often howler and white-faced capuchin monkeys swinging through the trees.

Unfortunately, it wasn't quite as warm in Brooklyn as it was in Costa Rica, and our flight home was cancelled due to a huge snow storm...luckily, so were Grammy and Granny Annie's flights, and after a quick drive from Miami, we were back in Brooklyn just in time to pick-up Connor from school on Monday.

Thank you Grammy and Granny Annie for enabling us to take another amazing trip!  We hope the boys were very good to you! 

First lunch at Manuel Antonio.

View from our room.

Our room's balcony.

Sunset from the pool at our villa.

Frog blending into the railing up to our room.

Bats.

Deer.

Lizard.

More bats.

3-toed sloth.

Giant spider.

Hawk.

HUGE insect.

Red crab.

Red-eyed leaf frog.

Howler monkey.

Our guide for our hike in the national park.

White-faced capuchin monkey.

Fresh coconut!

Sunset from El Avion.