Valentine's Day Together

I made up a song yesterday. Bet you can guess the tune:

Twinkle, twinkle little valentine

How I wonder if you will be mine.

Up above the world so high

Sending love into my insides.

Twinkle, twinkle little valentine

How I wonder if you will be mine.

(We actually did a better job of rhyming with the word "high," but I've already forgotten it. I really should start writing things down.)

We also sang a version of the Captain Superhugger (that's me dressed as him in the photo at the top of this blog) song, which is sung to the tune of the little-known Sesame Street song "Captain Vegetable":

It is I, Captain Superhugger

With my two arms and a heart full of love.

Giving lots of hugs is good for me

And it's good for you

So give them too

To your friends, your family, and even strangers by the bunch!

Three cheers for us, the superhuggers . . .

Hug, hug, hug.

In spite of the inadvertent rude gesture, I wanted to include

this photo to show that we're still using the repaired

pizza wheel (lower right corner) a year and a half later.

Then we hugged and hugged and hugged our friends. We sang a few more songs before trying to all sit together in a heart shape for a discussion of the people we love. (Isak was never quite satisfied with the shape we made. I could tell by his furrowed brow and the fact that he kept whispering to his friends to scoot back or scoot to the side.) When Dennis said, "I love everybody," it was a contagious sentiment and we all agreed we loved everybody. And, of course, we talked excitedly about the valentines we'd brought for our friends.

It was a blur of hands as we mixed our colors.

I'd not planned any of this, it's just how our 3-5 circle time worked out. A nice easy, natural flow with lots of participation. This group is getting good at circle time. The younger kids are stepping up and the older kids are learning to have patience, right on cue.

Uh mom, I'm pretty sure she came to school with her hands looking like that.

We also made new play dough. Sometimes the kids take turns adding the ingredients, then I do the cooking, but there were just too many kids crowded around and too few ingredients to add, so instead I put on a show. There were so many kids wanting to watch that several climbed up into the loft for balcony seating.

These are my play dough cooking tools. We do a risk

assessment before we start, determining together how we

can make sure we're all safe during the cooking process.

This time we agreed that we'd be safe at one end of the

table while I cooked at the other end.

Indeed, what a perfect, simple and spontaneous Valentine's Day together.