Hanging Out with the Big Kids

 Today we had a guest Turtle in our class! GK's dad Chris came to play and read us stories to help us celebrate GK's birthday! Chris read us two books, with LOTS of help from GK.

 Matthew also shared with us the news of his upcoming trip. He is leaving today to fly on an airplane to visit his cousins in California!

Then we set out for the day's adventure over to the Lower School playground. First we stopped to check out our mud. It looks like the water and the mud are separating, which is perfect for brick making!

 On the way to the big playground, we encountered a problem! Some Turtles were getting very upset when they were not the first ones to get to the bush, tree, or rock pile. It made them so sad, that we decided to stop and have a meeting about it.

Luckily, we were on the big kid playground, so we asked a couple of big kids to help us think about the problem. They had some ideas about how to create a rotation schedule so that it would be fair. This is a problem that we will keep on thinking about together.

 Once we got to the big playground, we had soooo much fun climbing, running, biking, swinging, and playing with the big kids!

"Escaping the Heck Out of Here"

Early on, we declared it "Backwards Day," and began to have "the most terrible day." We went outside first thing, where most of the Turtles traded names (including Carol and Tamara). 

Then, many of the Turtles decided to work on "escaping the heck out of here." They gathered magical items and climbed up and around and under, to locate a secret escape route.

After a silly snack outside (where milk was water and bananas were crackers), we went inside. There, we had Nightime Meeting, which we began, appropriately, with a Moment of Noise.

Then it was Maggie's turn for the Treasure Box, and she happily shared her items with friends and answered their questions.

Then, the Elephant returned to see about this consensus business. The Turtles took turns saying why they had chosen a particular character for the book ("Because they are cute," "Because they are pink," "I like them because they are stinky!"). After everyone had their say, the Turtles were asked if any of them wanted to change their minds, and quite a few did! 

However, we still had a few too many characters. Then, Tamara had an idea - what if we found a way to make our characters a blend of the things we liked best. The Turtles thought this was a great idea - so the Guinea Pig became the The Guinea Pig wearing Stinky Shoes, and the Dolphin became the Pink Dolphin and the Aardvark is now a Talking Aardvark who always has a Rainbow Parrot riding on his back! This was followed by a gleeful "Consensus Dance!" I think you'll agree that the process left us with far more colorful characters than we had at the beginning.

Then since the Turtles (or the Snakes, as we called them today), were so eager to escape, we decided to go with it. Slyly sneaking out the back door (which only opened with a magic word), we took off for sites unknown. The kids led the way and we discovered some new secret hideaways, a great rolling down hill and an abandoned soccer ball.

When we returned inside, Backward Day continued with the Turtles taking turns reading to the teachers. Soon, it was time to sing a song with no words, say hello to our half-day friends, and gather for breakfast. It was a very sad day ; )

So Much To Do...

After a bit of busy building first thing, the Turtles got ready for Morning Meeting. We read a new book,  The Recess Queen, and talked about the problems in the story.

Next, our elephant friend came to visit us again, to help us decide about who should be the main characters in our digital storybook.

He tried to use the "One Boss" method, but the Turtles weren't happy with that, so we decided to try the voting method, and each of the Turtles put their name above the character they wanted. Since we've narrowed it down, tomorrow we are going to try making our final choice through consensus.

At Choice Time, the Turtles were very happy to play with the Tube Racer again, and found some new methods to construct it and a finish line. We also added colors to all the keys on the keyboard, and friends were interested in figuring out how to play some familiar songs.

We went for a walk to the Lower School, and managed to find a few mud puddles on the way. We were off to return the cameras to Kathy's Kindergarten class, but we got distracted by many interesting people and sites along the way.

We saw butterflies in the Pre-K room,

family members in the hallways, art all over the place, and

a Luna moth in the Raj's Kindergarten! It seemed everywhere that we went, there were things to see and people to talk to. We barely made it back in time for our goodbye song!