A rare case of creativity

Sometimes my mom calls me creative and it always makes me laugh because as I've said before, my ideas are not generally my ideas.  Some are (like the improvement parties we have) but most come from other people and then I just add my little twist to it.  So, I am not sure how creative a copy cat is.  But, occasionally I do come up with my own ideas.  And since that doesn't happen very often, I feel like when it does, I ought to document it.  

I have been participating in a preschool co-op for Eli.  I taught a lot before the baby came so that when November came around I could take a break.  I started back up again in Feb.  This week I have to teach for the second time since the baby was born.  It's gone ok so far.  This week I had to teach on the letter T.  I had a hard time figuring out what theme to choose.  So, I finally decided we would hunt for treasure.  

We had  a map to follow and we had obstacles along our way--all having to do with the letter T.  At the end of course, we found our treasure.  

Our map.  Eli helped me draw the spider for the trippy tarantula  obstacle.  

I set everything up the night before so I wouldn't have to do anything in the morning.  Our mornings include making breakfast, getting kids ready for school, driving kids to school, and feeding the baby.  There isn't much time left after all that is done to set up for preschool.  

One of our obstacles--tricky turkeys 

terribly tired turtles

We started out at the train station where we got our map for the hunt and made trains out of the letter T so we could have a way to travel to our first obstacle.

We are missing two kids.  One girl is on vacation with her family and one boy just moved.--
Eli's best little buddy.  He's very sad that his friend had to move.

Eli's train

Our first obstacle was at the Tall Tree Forest where the trees wouldn't let us pass unless we first read them a story.  We read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom.  These trees were narcissistic and wanted us to read a book about a tree.  

After the trees let us pass we had to tip toe past the terribly tired turtles so they wouldn't wake up and snap at us.  Then we followed the map to the tricky turkeys.  The tricky turkeys would only let us by them if we first completed their puzzle successfully.  We had to sort all the pictures they gave us in to the right piles of pictures that started with T in one pile and pictures that didn't start with T in another pile.  We completed the puzzle (phew!) and were able to pass on by.

But unfortunately, our next task was even harder.  We came upon the Tanks of Terror who were trying to defeat us and didn't want us to find our treasure.  We could only go on our journey if we bombed them.  (I decided to make a battleship grid with tanks instead of ships.  The kids had to practice their letters and numbers to bomb the tanks.  It took them a little bit to get a hang of the game so we had a few misses before they understood how to play.  Eli made most of the hits because he has played battleship before and knew what to do.  But, Eli is still struggling to recognize his letters--he just really doesn't care much about learning them--so this was a great review for him)

After we bombed the last tank we made our way to our final challenge, crossing the pit full of trippy tarantulas.  We had to cross over the "bridge" to get past the tarantulas.

Finally, we found our treasure--a toy and some candy.

 I think the kids really enjoyed preschool today.  It is always fun for me to get to teach Eli and his friends.  The only thing I feel bad about is that since I am a mom of boys, I often think of boyish things and I always think maybe the girls would like something a little more girly.  But, I guess their mom's teach too so they can get a chance to do something girly then.  I teach again on Thursday and our theme is totally unrelated to treasure.  We are learning about teeth and I'm back to being my normal copy cat because most of those ideas are coming straight from Pinterest.