Watch This Space!

We're back! And when I say "we," I mean me and my best friend, Melissa. We'll be working on this blog together now, and I'm pretty sure it's going to be awesome.

We're still working out some of the little details, but we'll be ready to launch soon. Don't miss it!

Brushing Teeth!

But not really.

Before we get started here, I have to tell you about The Mailbox magazine [this isn't an ad--I just like it]. My preschool-y friend told me about it one day, and I checked an issue of it out of our library. Oh, man. It's geared toward PreK teachers, but most of the activities are totally adaptable for a smaller group of kids--or for one kid, if you're like me.

So you're going to be seeing a lot of ideas here that I got from The Mailbox.

Like this one!



Here's the idea: print out a big ol' picture of a tooth. Put it in a smooth page protector, and scribble on it with dry-erase pens. Then explain to your kid [ahem, your student] about why we brush our teeth--and then give them an old toothbrush and have them scrub all the marks off the tooth.

I brush Little Boy's teeth regularly, but we don't spend much time talking about why. We're usually in a hurry to brush and move on to whatever's next. So this activity was a good reinforcement of why, exactly, we brush our teeth.

Target's $1 Bins

I gotta tell ya--I'm not a frequent Target shopper. Walmart is half a mile closer, and yes, I'm that lazy.

But when my rockin' friend Sharline told me that Target had some school-type stuff in their dollar bins, I sucked it up and drove an extra half-mile. And boy, am I glad I did.

This was a week or two ago, and at that time, about half the stuff in the dollar bins was school-related, and about half was summer stuff. I'm hoping they'll clear out the summer stuff soon [they probably have by now, actually], and then maybe they'll have even more often stuff. How many times can I stay "stuff" in this post? Five so far.

Anyway, I only picked up a few things.


A dry-erase writing board (it has lines on one side, and it's blank on the other), a "perpetual calendar," a planner, an activity book that Little Boy picked out, and some pom-poms (the pom-poms are kind of weird, but good enough for my purposes).



This was actually $2.50. But still a good deal. (Sorry about the weird glare--the plastic was still on it when I took the picture.) I'm not sure Little Boy is really "getting" the calendar concept yet, but I figure that he'll at least learn the vocabulary for now.

[No more "stuff"! Except for that one. That makes six.]