Lots On my Mind...

...but not much to report.

I have a million (ok, three or four) ideas for things to post here. There are things floating around in my head that might actually have some sort of significance and provoke some thought.

I'm not posting any of them today. Madeline is still recovering from her no-nap day yesterday and I'm too tired to articulate anything profound.

Instead, I thought I'd share some of the things we've been doing around here. I started digging around in the attic of my brain, fishing around for some of the things I learned in all those education classes in which we had to listen to the elementary ed majors give their presentations. Hey, what do you know? That wasn't a big, fat waste of my time after all!

Between those foggy memories and Pinterest, I've been doing some creative, fun stuff with Madeline. We've been painting and coloring a lot, and I finally introduced her to Play-Doh. I made some bowling pins out of water bottles, painted them in pretty pastel colors, and took her outside to knock them down with her purple ball. She watched with interest as I showed her how to knock them down with the ball, and then yelled, "MESS!" and proceeded to clean them up.
That was the last time she touched them.

I made a display area for her art on her bedroom wall with a ribbon and some push pins, and I've been hanging her beautiful pictures with clothes pins. I might not be describing that very well, but it does look cute.

Since I'm so schedule-driven, I went to the local school supply store and bought some of the goodies I used to peddle when I was a poor college student working in a different school supply store. Truth be told, I always wanted an excuse to buy some of the cute stuff, but high school English teachers don't usually have a use for a laminated calendar with smiley-faced monkeys on it. Anyway, I put the calendar over the toy box and have been using it to plan our week, including what we're doing for art time and outdoor play, our dinner menu, and our weekly Bible verse.
It's actually working pretty well. It's kind of like making lesson plans, except that it doesn't take me an hour to do it, I don't have to write out that I'm covering standard 1.39245 objective 3.104B, and I don't have to post it outside my door so that someone can come in and check to make sure that I am teaching ONLY that standard and objective and absolutely nothing else. (What? You thought your kids were allowed to learn stuff that might expand their minds and make them think further? Sorry. Not anymore.)

So, that's it. Just a lot of fun kid stuff and a little passive-aggressive snark aimed at the current trends in education.

Maybe soon I can get my thoughts together enough to post something of substance.