mommapalooza

Trick or Treat

a beary big project

I've blogged before about the mystery surrounding the daily activities at Madeline's preschool. She's been a student there for nearly three months now, and is somewhat more forthcoming with details about what she does each morning. The activity that I find the most intriguing is their big project - bears. Bears seem to have taken over every learning objective in her classroom!

It started, I believe, when the class read the story Bear Snores On by Karma Wilson (great book - we've borrowed all of the sequels from the library). Then the class wanted a bear cave of their own. So, they pretended that a large box was a bear cave. Then, the class decided to paint it, so they had to figure out what colour bear caves were. Next, they had to determine what kind of objects, if any, were in bear caves. Reportedly, the troupe of three year-olds went into the school yard to collect leaves for the interior of their bear cave.

The bears are everywhere. Madeline and her class have made art like bears, walking across a canvas on paint-covered hands and feet. They count bears at their math table, trace bears on their computer station, and they probably try to dance like bears during their movement and music unit on Wednesdays.

They've smelled and tasted some of the foods that bears eat. When Madeline brought home a muffin last Thursday, their cooking day, it contained the kind of berries that bears like to eat, of course.  I was glad they didn't make muffins with salmon :)

This weeks, the intrepid three year-olds have brought stuffed bears from home to live in the bear cave, and tomorrow, the teddy bears are having a picnic ...

The Secret Lives of Preschoolers

Chris and I have concluded that we'll never fully know how Madeline fills the hours between eight in the morning and noon on weekdays. She's at preschool, and she's already mastered the "I don't know" auto-reply when we ask her what she did at school that day. We can get more detailed answers from her, but we have to know exactly which detailed questions to ask. It's not uncommon for us to be clueless for the majority of the week.

It's quite a treat when we're permitted a little insight into her life away for us. For the past little while, she's run madly around the house in the morning, ignoring my reminders that it's time to leave for school. "I need something to show!" she explains, dashing about. Show on the playground? Anyway, she eventually finds some treasured object that she wants to take to school and stuffs it in her backpack. I always assumed that it was something to play with in the school yard. Then, one day last week, Madeline's teacher came up to me at pick-up time and said that Madeline had done a really good job talking about her ball (the treasured object of the day) for Show & Tell.

Um. Show and Tell? Why was that the first that I'd heard of it? I immediately started panicking inside, wondering if Madeline had missed other Show and Tell days, because I didn't remind her to pack something, because I didn't know that she even had Show and Tell!

But then I calmed down. Madeline seems to be fine with taking responsibility for Show and Tell. If she's cool, well, I guess I can be, too.

madeline's mail

  madeline's mail 
  Originally uploaded by goingdomestic.

Madeline doesn't receive mail very often, so it's quite a treat to watch her excited little face when a new edition of one of her magazines arrives. Sometimes she immediately starts "reading" the new magazine to herself, and other times she'll ask Chris or I to sit down and read it to her. She keeps all of the old issues, too. They spent a couple of months in our car, being thumbed through on the often-slow treks into central Bangkok until I became quite tired of reading the one-minute stories about the lives of "Tommy" and "Tess" in Wild Animal Baby over and over again. Now the magazines are kept in a careful stack and carried from one room to another in our apartment.

for the baby name obsessed

The Globe & Mail ran this article recently: Unique's the name - finding it is their game. I thought it was fun to read predictions of future popular names from the so-called name experts at the end ...

.... zzzz ....

It's been about ten months since Madeline has treated herself (and her hardworking mama) to a regular afternoon nap. We flew across Canada quite a few times in the space of five weeks in December and January, and I think that the travel and time zones are what did the nap in. She could still benefit from a daily dose of afternoon shut-eye, but professes not to see the logic when I try to convince her of that.

Sometimes when I'm preparing dinner, around five in the evening, I'll notice that the house has gone silent. Eeek! I know that Madeline is wiped out come evening, but if she naps at that hour she'll be up until nine or ten at night! My policy had been to immediately wake the sleeping child, and then deal with the consequences: utterly cranky child who can only be placated with her favourite unhealthy foodstuffs.

The last two times that this has happened, though, Chris and I have taken a different approach: we just put her to bed (albeit early and without dinner). It's gone quite well, though. Madeline slept straight from 5-11 pm last night, woke up and asked for her jammies (yes), snack (yes), and her bedtime stories (raincheck on that one). I think that she woke even later at night the first time. We get her changed and armed with a cup of dry Cheerios, and she dozes off again until morning.  It's so much more pleasant than finishing the evening with an over-tired and cranky three year-old ...

small medium large

About eighteen months ago, any time that Madeline and I would take a walk around St. John's, she would practice one of her favourite activities: finding similar objects that came in different sizes. "There's a mommy snail, there's a baby snail, and that's a daddy!" she'd gleefully announce, crouching on the side of the sidewalk watching a group of snails slowly make their way to the lake. The same logic - that objects came in Baby, Mommy, and Daddy sizes - was applied by my little whiz kid to leaves, dogs, socks, crayons, and vegetables alike. Chris and I thought she was brilliant, making a size connection like that!

One day last week, Madeline announced that I was "medium", and I was sad. Somehow, small/medium/large isn't as endearing. But I am glad to know that she must be paying attention in preschool at least some of the time :)

rain, rain, go away ...

It's Friday, and I didn't even have to look out the window to know that it would rain this morning. This is the fourth rainy Friday in a row, which is unfortunate because it was only five weeks ago that Madeline's preschool class started their Friday morning outdoor water play program. So, Madeline's class has only had water play one time since the beginning of the school year. I've dutifully packed her swim outfit in her backpack every Thursday night, and I feel a little sad each time I unpack it, dry, on Friday afternoons. I think that she really liked the water play - after the first time, she told me that she played with soapy sponges. Chris saw a photo of her class at her school's open house earlier this week - it was taken during water play and they were trying to see how many three year-olds fit inside a single bathtub. It sounds like Madeline and her classmates are missing some good stuff ...

Speaking of good stuff, it's been a really long time since I had my act together to organize my favourite links of the week ... but lo and behold:

• Z Recommends - this is one my new favourite blogs. I think that Madeline might be a little older than Z, but the posts at this site are for such interesting toys, products, and music!  I found the Sippy Cup Showdown post very informative (because the leak factor is oh-so-important to me), and I actually won something (a deck of Bright and Beyond activity cards) from reading this site. Cool, huh?
• Monkey Bars are so Old School - I'd never contemplated the evolution of children's playgroup equipment before, so I found this article interesting. I'm from the old-school era (loved merry-go-rounds), so it was helpful to have some of the new-fangled equipment on the playground explained to me :)
• I've seen this kid-friendly bento box in a few blogs, but Ask Moxie has a good post about it (and plastics) here. I think they're terrifically cute and useful in that the number of containers would motivate me to fill them all with veggies, but sadly, Madeline's school will provide lunch when she attends for a full day. No whimsical bento box for her yet.

The 133rd wonderful thing about Madeline

Every Friday, Madeline picks out a new book from her preschool's small library. Every Friday, before we go back to our vehicle to head home for lunch, Madeline finds a good bench in the school yard for us to sit on. And every Friday, we sit together and read her new library book. She just can't wait.