First Day at Busy Bees!

Today was the much anticipated first day of Busy Bees Pre-K. I know that all the kids were excited to start off the year. I'll admit I was apprehensive about how the first day would go. Luckily, April volunteered to borrow Margaret so that I could just focus on corralling our 8 little Bees. I am writing longer than usual so that you moms can have a feel for what to expect when your turn comes, especially if it is soon.

Everyone started off with writing their names. I remembered after two or three had done it that I had intended for the first week to give them each a piece of paper with an enormous font that they could just copy. Oh well, next time.

Writer's Workshop went better than I had expected for the first day, although we did run over time by almost 10 minutes. I quickly discovered that this will be the time when our kids spill our secrets to the other moms. While some of the kids reported things like "I read books with my daddy" or "I played with blocks", we did hear that Noah's mom hates the Cat in the Hat movie and that Ethan punched Sidney in the face and bloodied her nose this morning! It made for some great variety in the stories told during Writers' Workshop!:)

I chose to do the transition between free play and Writer's Workshop because that is when they needed it. We did music after, however. The kids loved learning Show Me How You Do the Monkey and The Pony Song, although it still needs some work:).

We skipped calendar because we were behind on time and jumped right into our book, How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World. The kids did great listening and most of them raised their hand when they wanted to speak after watching Ryder do so like a pro! He was fantastic! We listed the ingredients for making apple pie, then went out to the dining room table and mixed in the sugar, flour, cinnamon, and salt with the already prepared apples. Then each kiddo got a piece of pie crust and shaped their own apple pocket pie. I think their favorite part was rubbing flour all over the table and generally making a big mess:)

Outside time! I scrambled to clean up our mess, make sure the pies were sealed and get them in the oven, and pop some popcorn. The kids had a great time playing, although the girls thought they might need to report any infractions of the "be nice" rule every five seconds. I stepped outside and reminded them that Busy Bees are always nice and respectful, but mostly let them handle their grievances. We gathered around the outside table for apple pie (frozen, store bought so as to not tempt me) and popcorn. Everyone was very polite and about half of them actually ate the pie! Sydney and Paige LOVED it.

Back inside, we counted our apples that the kids had brought and sorted them by color and size. We cut them in half and talked about the concept that two halves make a whole. Several of them were concerned because they wanted to eat their apples, so I passed everyone half their apple to munch on while we got ready to do our apple stamping with the other halves. We used red, green, and yellow, since those are the colors of apples. I thought they turned out really cute and wish that I had taken a picture of everyone's. Here is Bronwen's.

Now, on to centers. I had them all sit down on the rug while I explained what centers are and how they work. Then we took a couple of minutes to see how to do each center. That left time for them to do two 5 minute centers, which turned out to be perfect.

Lastly, we did Phonics with Andy the Anteater. Ask your kids about what Andy has an appetite for or an allergy to. They did great!

Of course, we did Book Look at the end. For some of them, that is their favorite time, and they were very worried that we weren't going to have Book Look.

All in all, a great day! We may have to tweak the timing of some things, but let's give it a few weeks and see how things develop. I was proud of our Busy Bees.