FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!!  Today was an amazing day all about Fire Fighters!  We learned so much to get ready for our Out and About to the Fire Station tomorrow.  It will be so exciting to see everything in action.

Our book today was called Fire Fighters by Norma Simon.  It was a story about all things that firemen do at the fire station and the tools they use to put out a fire.  We learned so many new vocabulary words!  We made a list of all the things from the book that we want to look for tomorrow on our trip.  We went in the hall with some pretend smoke (a white shower curtain) and talked about why it's important to stay low and crawl instead of walking.  Everyone took a turn crawling UNDER the smoke so that we wouldn't end up coughing!  It was a lot like Ms. Michelle's tunnel....so their were zero protests!

In art, we made fireman hats.  We are getting much better with painting, but it is still an activity that requires many adult hands to help!!  The hardest part was keeping the wet hats off the kiddo's heads until they were dry. 

Science was easily the favorite activity of the day!  We took a short walk to the park with our TK friends for our experiment.  After a short lesson on fire safety and some predicting about what might happen when we set the paper on fire, we put a piece of blue construction paper on the grill and lit it with a lighter!  You could have heard a pin drop!  Everyone watched in amazement as the paper burned!  They had so much fun with that activity, I don't think they even noticed that we didn't play at the park!  We talked about the science experiment the whole walk back and not one kid said anything about playing.  Instead there were some pretty difficult questions about where the paper went and why it wasn't blue anymore.  Now.....that is real progress!!

Ms. Michelle was back today and she brought so many fun things!  We started with cotton balls on a parachute.  When we shook the parachute, it made "snow".  The kids LOVED this!  So much giggling and laughter!  There were numerous, spontaneous requests to do it again!  After that, Ms. Michelle brought out some snow in a bowl.  It felt cold and wet, even though it wasn't.  She had hidden some things in the snow and had some measuring cups for the children to play with.  It was a mini Touch and Feel pool!  We finished the session by making snowmen out of marshmallows.  These were special marshmallows....not for eating.....only for art!  At least that's what I told the children.....about one hundred times!!  It wasn't as hard as you might imagine to keep the kids from eating their projects, but there were definitely some marshmallows that didn't make it onto the paper!!  Today was Ms. Erin's last day with us!  She has been a wonderful help and I'm sure Ms. Michelle will miss her as much as the kids will! 

What a fun day learning about such an important community helper!!