"Hey teacher, look!"

My students have so much fun out on the playground. There are slides to ride, monkey bars to climb on, tunnels to crawl through and sand boxes to dig in. Not only are our sandboxes full of magic, wonder and imagination...they are also full of junk. They're like the island of lost pocket-sized toys and other stuff. Until recently, I actually had a small collection of things my students have called me over to look at over the past couple months:

As you can see there is a marble, a penny, part of a watch buckle, some weird orange toy thing, a hex-nut, and of course, every preschooler's favorite plaything: a nail. 

I love that when they discover something new, their excitement bubbles over and they just HAVE to show it to me. Like today for instance, I was supervising the playground, making sure all the little kiddos were safe and I hear the yell "Hey miss Lauren, we found something...come look!" Right about now, you're probably thinking, 'hmm I wonder what they found' (don't lie...you're curious). Well, it was a dead bird. A very, very dead bird. With ants crawling all over it's poor, dead bird carcass. It was gross. They don't teach you how to deal with stuff like this in preschool teacher school...