Life's a Beach

This week we've been exploring the beach - from the ease of the daycare room and the backyard! We've already done some beach coloring pages, made some octopus - octopi? from the kiddos' handprints and spent countless hours pretending to be at the beach. Today we took some water bottles, sand and teeny-tiny shells to create everyone's own little beach in a bottle. Great practice for scooping and dumping skills for little hands when getting the sand in the bottle and pinching to get the tiny shells in. Some really liked shaking 'em up and making the water murky and some liked waiting til it was all clear and pretty so they could see all the shells.









We added sea shells to the little sandbox where everyone liked digging for treasure!





When we came in to unwind some before lunch, we did some water-color painting on a couple paper plates. Later today I'll help everyone turn the plates into some super cute little fishies! All the kids did a great job manipulating the paintbrushes and I'm learning that the littler kids enjoy seeing the result of painting much more than they do coloring with crayons. Guess I'm going to have to work on relaxing a little bit and doing more things with paint. (Deep breaths - I can do it!)