post office DAY HOME

So for the month of April Im loosely planning around the theme of community and cars.  The children have started to move the interest back towards cars a little bit so i thought i would expand on that and add community, or in our city.  Also, my daughter and youngest day home child have been playing store and ordering coffee and such so i thought i'd set up a drive thru which ties together the community and cars!
So heres where we started, the post office! I have been collecting envelopes everytime i get junk mail i keep the envelope and recycle the rest, i've also collected some cards and letter sets and had a giant stack so i put this out, with some stickers and labels (also have a ton of these from countless charities).  Then i made a mail box out of a cardboard box, the mail slot was a little high, but seemed to add more fun for the children!

 this stack looks alot smaller in the picture.

 as you can see, the mail slot is quite high!  Kayla LOVED this activity! i had an opening at the bottom on the back so they could get the mail out again, she spent the entire week writing letters, putting letters in the mail box, taking them out, handing them out.  she LOVED it!!

in they go!
As an add on to this activity I had the children write 'real' letters, they wrote a letter to each other and to their parents then we went to the post office, bought stamps and mailed those letters in the real mailbox! and the next day their mail came! This was also a big hit, and really fun because the older 2 (blake and my day home child) decided to write letters to each other but not show the other person their letter so it was a surprise when it came.  unfortunately i brought a camera with a dead battery to the post office so no pictures of this, but it was so cute!!

another extension of the project, we painted the mail box!

nothing to do with the post office just something we did that week, sewing with beads and plastic needles.

 ok, again, not related to post office. BUT i had to big long boxes and couldn't just send them out to recycling, so we made a bean bag toss game out of the second one!  I cut out the shapes, then the children decorated the boxes, then spent the ENTIRE day playing bean bag toss! for some reason i dont have a picture of the full box, but it was long and skinny, so they started with the box laying horizontal, then decided they needed more of a challenge and stood it up and aimed for the highest slot on it.  They climb in the box, they laid under the box while others threw beanbags in. Seriously, an entire day spent playing bean bag toss!!