Cupcake Decorating with Homestyle Bakery

Over Christmas Break, Homestyle Bakery came and demonstrated how to decorate cupcakes for School Age!  The best part was we got to eat them afterwards!  

Ms. Sara, our guest, has two children here at HTPL so she was glad to come out and show us what wonderful things Homestyle Bakery has at their store.  She icing she made was green, red, and white swirl - like a Christmas candy cane!

We got to decorate the cupcake ourselves and then add some extra sprinkles and other decorations to it as well.  We had tons of fun!

Time to eat!!

Proud of her decorating skills :)

This demonstrates the red, white, and green swirls.  We got to watch how she stuffed the icing container to make this swirl pattern.  We were impressed.

Here are some of the extra decorations we could add.

This is Ms. Sara helping with the icing decorating.  Some kids wanted to do it all themselves and others wanted help from Ms. Sara.

We are thankful to Homestyle Bakery for coming out and having such a fun workshop for us to learn from.  The cupcakes were so good!  

Thank you, Ms. Sara!

Basil Plants

For a long-term science project in schoolage we chose to plant Basil Plants.  We planted two different kinds of basil.  The kit came with all the ingredients, we just planted and watered them to start off.

These are the dirt mounds with holes in the center for us to put the seeds into.

Adding some water to the mounds.

Putting in the seeds.

This is the "green house" cover that goes on top of the container.

Every few days we have been writing down our observations of the plant growth.

This is what they look like today, two weeks after we planted them.  We love looking at them at the end of each day and seeing what new developments have happened.  They are growing quite well!  We are excited for them to get big enough that we can use the leaves to cook yummy things!

Pumpkin Carving Contest

Holly Tree Priest Lake had a center wide Pumpkin Decorating Contest.  The parents voted on the pumpkin they liked best and the winner won an ice cream party.  

School age entered Finding Nemo into the competition:

Though it was a close race...

SCHOOL AGE WON!!!  

Thanks, parents, for voting!  We loved our ice cream party!

Fall Leaves

Ms. Robin took these great pictures yesterday afternoon.  The whole back half of the playground is full of leaves right now.  The kids have been enjoying playing in them for the past few days and yesterday we got some great shots!  

It was crazy hair day at Thomas Edison in case you are wondering about some crazy hair in this picture! :)

I LOVE this picture so much!!

Happy Fall!!

Autumn Afternoon

I apologize for all the poor quality pictures I've had on here.  I finally got my hands on a better camera and snapped some great ones the other day.  I hope you enjoy these from our time playing outside during this beautiful fall season. 

Fire Truck and Talent Show - Friday, October 12

Today was our fire truck visit!  I wasn't there in time to get pictures of it but I'm sure the preschool will get pics uploaded from it on their blog:  http://hollytreepriestlake.blogspot.com

In the afternoon we had our talent show.  This was just an opportunity for the kids to perform for each other.  I didn't advertise to the preschool and parents like we did for the summer talent show.  I just wanted it to be low key and something for the kids to enjoy on their last day of fall break.

 The program lasted for about an hour with all kinds of talent being performed.

This was two girls singing a duet.

This was an ad lib solo by this girl.

Another vocal duet.

This girl made a bird whistling noise with her mouth.  I loved it! 

This was a dancing crew.  One boy danced in the middle and cued the other two boys to jump in at their turns.  They would do cartwheels and other tricks on cue in the choreography.  

   

This was a comedic act.  

This was a puppet show a few girls put together.

We ended the talent show with a group picture.  I had to do it in two shots because there were too many of them!  We loved the talent show!!

Our final picture here is at snack.  I had just announced the team challenge winners.  All week long they were grouped into two teams to compete with.  Competitions included Bible games, relay races, and other games.  Individuals were awarded points for their teams when they followed directions.  It was a great motivator for the kids to keep focused and in control during fall break.  They all received a prize for the awesome week they had.

Guitar Special Guest - Thursday, October 11

Today we had a special guest come in the afternoon.  This was a musical guest who brought his electric guitar for us to hear!  We had been looking forward to this for some time because we all love guitar :)

Our special guest was actually Ms. Karla's husband.  Mr. Raul is a local musician who plays for two bands in the Nashville area.  He brought his amplifier, electric guitar that was hallow bodied so it could make acoustic guitar sounds as well, and a pedal board that could change the guitar's sounds.  We enjoyed listening to him talk about the sounds and hearing all that it could do.  Mr. Raul and Ms. Karla sang some songs together as well.

We sat very nicely and listened to our speaker.

Here you can kind of see his pedal board at his feet that he used to make different sounds.

Here he is changing the sounds with his feet on the pedal board.

We did have to do some dancing with the fun music being played.

We loved our special guest!