Caroline has been telling us for a while that she doesn't really LEARN stuff at school, they just play. She said the only thing they have learned is how to handle things gently, because they might be someone else's favorite activity and we would feel bad if we broke it and our friend couldn't get to play with it anymore. But then last week while walking to storytime, Caroline gave a very well-thought-out (for a 4 year old) explanation of evaporation! She said "Mom, did you know that if you left an ice cube outside for a long time, like 82 minutes (her number for everything), it would melt and the water would disappear? That's called evaporation." So we talked about how if it was a super-hot day, it would evaporate even faster, and we talked about where the water goes, etc. It was REALLY impressive!
Then the following night Caroline was playing with a little clay turtle statue and she said "I'm pretending that this is a fossil and I dug it up in the back yard." James and I had one of those silent parental conversations that you have in your mind while you look at each other and I said "but what's a fossil? I haven't heard that word from you before." She said that a fossil is a stone with a picture of an animal or plant or something that lived a really "super-long" time ago on it. We were just blown away!
