Parents Sharing Day

We survived our Parents Sharing Day presentation at Catie’s school. Well mostly at least! I think we both need a couple hours of quiet to recover, but poor Andy has to go teach for the next three hours! I was not expecting so many parents to come to it, but there were a lot of other moms with their younger kids there too. Hopefully we didn't completely embarrass ourselves!

For our presentation, we brought in some fossils from home, did a short PowerPoint presentation talking about what a fossil is and what Indiana looks like today versus during the Ordovician ~450 million years ago, and then had the kids make "fossils" by pressing pinecones, leaves, feathers, plastic dinosaurs, etc. into clay. At the end we handed out directions to make a trilobite at home. Normally I wouldn't try to do a slide show for little kids, but I was worried about the language barrier and thought that lots of pictures would help get the point across. I suspect the most memorable part of the talk (other than seeing actual fossils) was learning that Indiana has skunks living there. The skunk photo was a big hit!

The kids were very good. I do not know how much they learned, but after a few moments of hesitation, they got really into the clay fossil-making activity. That said, I think I’m going to bring a couple of beers to share with the next unlucky set of parents after the next Parents Sharing Day :-)

Catie's class listening to my presentation. They are all in their art smocks because they were prepared to use their clay - "which of these things is not like the others?"

starting our fossil project

making fossils is serious work!

Catie & Anna putting some muscle into it!

Andy working with another table

preschool barely controlled chaos!

The shoe SOLUTION!

 This is unrelated to our presentation today, but I wanted to let you all know that we have solved Catie's shoe problem! It turns out that Japanese children's shoes are constructed quite differently than US shoes. They open further down- effectively opening in half, have the tongue sewn in on one side, and are MUCH EASIER to take off and put on. Getting Catie some (kind of ugly, but super cheap) Japanese sneakers has solved her shoe problems at school! The strawberry "crocs" are her pool shoes. On pool days, the kids have to change from their outdoor shoes to indoor shoes, which go on and off several times depending on what area of the classroom the kids are in, then into their pool shoes, back to indoor shoes (on & off a bit), and finally to go home they change into their outdoor shoes. The first day with her new shoes Catie was able to all that by herself!!!