April Fool's Day

I had fun with our little playgroup this morning, so I thought I would share. I mentioned to my friend the other night that I didn't know what to do with them this week, and she pointed out that it was April Fool's Day. So I started looking around the internet for fun things.

The first thing I liked for the food. I had never thought of this before, but a bunch of sites had recipies for food that looked like something it wasn't. I went with the fake fish sticks, which are actually wafer cookie sticks covered in peanut butter and then rolled in crushed cornflakes. Since my group is 2-3 year olds, I did the PB, but they really enjoyed using a rolling pin on the ziploc of cornflakes to crush it, and then sprinkling them on top of the cookies. And the "peas" of green apple taffy were a big hit. They also liked the clear kool-aid that I made, because they could easily see the gag that it looked like water but tasted much better. Anything that makes their food more sugary can't seem bad to them, right?

The whole day I kept talking to them about how "April Fool's!" meant pretending something was true that wasn't, so our next game was playing dress up. Thank heavens for my awesome sister-in-law, who drew our name for last Christmas and sent us her hand-me-down box of dress-up clothes as well as our present. Levi especially got into his role as the cheetah, and spent the whole time crawling around and growling at our "princesses".

And then for our coloring time, I altered some normal pages to have something wrong with them, so we could talk about what was "silly" about the picture. It took only 5 minutes in photoshop to download a coloring page and then put flowers growing out of a tree and replace the face of a bunny with something else.

I am no preschool teacher, but I felt like I actually made things work today. I have to say that having kids this age stretches me, because I have always felt perfectly at home teaching teenagers math topics. I look at these kids that don't even know how to talk yet, and I am so glad that I have had help from Kids on the Move and everything else to teach me the "early childhood education" stuff everyone else I knew majored in at BYU. Guess they had the right idea in some ways! Except later on, when they have to pay for me to tutor their teenager in Algebra. Ha! Take that!