The Second Day of PEP

Today was our second day of enrichment - and since the class I am teaching is only 6 weeks long, I am 1/3 of the way through it.  It went a lot better this time - I started off by taking them to the playground and they were pretty wiggly, so they played really hard - plus it was really hot, so after 10 minutes we gathered on a blanket and I read them a book called Building an Igloo.  (Today's theme was native Alaskans).  Although they were very interested in the igloo book, the concept of a "native American" of any sort was extremely foreign to all of them - even Caleb seemed clueless, and we read a lot about American Indians when we studied Arizona.  So I just generalized and told them we were learning about people who live in Alaska.  After the igloo book, we played a game called Caribou Eyes, which is a real native Alaskan game.  The original version has "it" stand in the middle of a circle and ask each person in the circle what animal they are - then they stomp on the foot of one of the people in the circle, causing them to break the circle and "it" runs off.  Whoever tags "it" becomes "it".  I omitted the foot stomping and told "it" just to look for an opening and run through it.  The girl I chose to be "it" first, was super fast, they ran a loooong time before anyone caught her.  She was so fast, they were too hot and tired to play the next round.  Even the kid who caught her didn't want to do it again!  Regardless, that tired them out pretty much perfectly and they were able to sit nicely and do the craft - which was the hats I posted about a few weeks ago.

They turned out super cute - and were a big hit with the moms picking the kids up :)  We didn't even have time to do the sky tossing (definitely getting moved to a different day) or read The Polar Bear Son - which is probably my favorite of the fiction books I selected for the class.  So that is success in my book - I'd definitely rather not finish everything than finish too early. 

When we got home, I pulled my purse out of the van and my camera flew out of it.  It hit the ground with a petite sounding crack - and my heart just sank.  These digital gadgets are just too fragile!  It had come apart at the top and I could not get it to turn on.  Later on though, I popped the top back together (mostly) and it started working again...whew...

And speaking of working cameras - Natalie seems to have started walking.  She does it on a part-time basis.  She walked quite a bit a few nights ago and then crawled for several days.  Tonight she walked a lot when she noticed we clapped for her when she did it.  So we shall see if this is it. 

just coincidentally also wearing the Yu'pik Woman hat!