Just like that, we are at the end of our school year, albeit a bit earlier than usual. We had our end of year party with a butterfly theme, complete with games, crafts, decorations, obstacles courses, cupcakes and of course great little friends.

I would like to say a sincere thank you to all the families that believed in Blooming Butterflies from the very beginning. There have been wonderful friendships, of many I hope to keep, and so glad to see that many of the children throughout the years have kept as well.

To all the Blooming Butterflies... may your wings take you to new heights.

All my love,

Ms. Audra

Happy Earth Day!
We have been spending the week talking and learning about ways in which we can help the Earth. Everyone had such wonderful ideas on how they could contribute. The very first thing they thought of was picking up garbage, so we talked about the importance of asking a grown up what an item is before handling it, and wearing protective items like gloves or using garbage claws.

The kids had crumpled paper races, crafted with recyclables and items we found in the laying around, and reused terracotta pots that were destined for the trash to create their own little flower pots. They added their own coloured pinwheels and some had plans to add dirt. Cute!

The kids also sorted images of good and bad things for the Earth.

Our focus books this week included
- The Earth Book by Todd Parr
- Why I love the Earth, illustrated by
- What Matters by
- Curious George plants a tree by
- How the crayons saved the Earth by Monica Sweeney

We continued to work on our French colours, this time moving to secondary colours. They are quite interested and doing an awesome job! All of the big kids can count to ten in French and have been wanting to learn teen numbers as well, as we are going with the flow!

Happy Easter! I hope everyone had a wonderful Easter.

We were excited about everything Easter so we decided to continue Easter activities into this week. The kids told me how much they wanted to go on egg hunts, so we did everything Easter egg hunt style. The kids hunted for eggs containing letters they practiced writing on the board, eggs containing colours they had to sort, and of course goodies they could take home.

The kids made and painted salt dough Easter ornaments, that they were quite happy to carry around when dry and tied.

The big kids worked together to match uppercase and lowercase letters by putting the capital letter carrots into the lowercase soil piles.

We completed our second round of letter learning by doing the last diagonal letter in the alphabet, Z.

And we cannot forget that a loose tooth fell out! Exciting times!

It actually feels like Spring. Well we have an interesting mixture of snow, ice, puddles and mud. We never know what to wear outside! But we are happy to be spending hours outdoors exploring and getting dirty!

We decided that we have collected enough feathers over the past months that we can actually do something with them now. First up, sequencing them from shortest to tallest. We also tried to figure out what birds these feathers could have belonged to by examining the clues of colour, size and fluff/lack thereof.

Our letters this week were W and X. In addition to our songs, puzzles and letter building, we played some letter Go Fish.

We celebrated a very Happy 5th Birthday too! They just keep getting bigger!

We are so excited that Spring is here and the snow has been melting! There's a lot of wet muddy play to come!

The kids and I enjoyed learning about rain, rainbows, thunderstorms and the sun. There's so much to learn! We also know that many plants begin a new growth cycle in the Spring (maybe later for us, but it's coming!) and so we cut out and decorated little flowers.

Some other things we did this week were; built with Velcro sticks, made new pink play dough, built lots of lego creations and had visits from a few children who attended Blooming Butterflies in previous years.

Lately we have been working on counting to ten in French. They pretty much have it now!

We discovered jazz music in previous months and continue to really enjoy listening to it when we are working on projects and activities. Now we have started using our bodies to move to jazz music. It is very neat to see where the music takes everyone's bodies. I have seen dancing that looks like ballet, jazz, and contemporary type dance. Love it!

Our letters this week were N and V.

The big kid shave been working on identifying/reading/sounding out smaller words on the cover pages of the stories we read. They are doing amazingly well! I had such a proud moment this week when the kids spelled FLOWER on their own when given laminated pictures of flowers that each had a letter from the word. I gave them the cards, didn't tell them what it was for, and they figured it out on their own. It started with someone thinking it spelled something, then moved to another thinking it spelled FLOWER because all the pictures were flowers and then finally to them trying to sound it out and piecing together the letters. Awesome teamwork!

We were so fortunate to receive many wonderful hand-me-downs and crafting supplies from a lady in the neighbouring community. We are so very grateful. The kids had an awesome time with an overflowing craft table of supplies!

Happy St. Patrick's Day! We were very excited for this day!
The leprechaun left gold at the end of the rainbow....well, at the end of three rainbows that the kids made! The kids were very excited to collect the gold!

Some activities we did for St. Patrick's Day were
-Green coin hunt, count and group
-Sequencing rainbow numbers 1-20
-St.Patrick's counting and number identification
-Built rainbows out of blocks, and cute one out of papers
.-The kids used their knowledge of letter sounds and previous number word matching to match number number words and representations.
Sensory fun with shaving cream, green coins, tiny pots, and green and gold sparkly paint.

Our letters this week were A and M. Song, puzzle, build with magnetic lines, write

Our brainstorming board of the bugs we could think of and learned about is quite full!  We learned about butterflies, army ants, beetles and cockroaches. We discovered facts about these bugs that we didn't know before such as beetles can live frozen through out the winter and cockroaches don't have a brain! We also learned a lot about what these bugs eat, who their predators are, the roles they play in the ecosystem and within their own species, and how they use their senses to survive.

Our bug theme and Eric Carle inspired art came together nicely through Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar. We love that book! We even enjoyed a few rounds of our caterpillar crawl game that involved  colours, numbers and sequencing.

We continued our Eric Carle inspired art this week and created a few "painted" papers using feathers, plastic letters, pine cones and pine needle twigs. Using these and the papers created last week., we created new art work (beaches, butterflies, volcanoes, and the underground).

Our letters this week were R and K. In addition to our songs and puzzles, the kids practiced identifying and writing letter R, and drew pictures that started with the letter k.

It was Bella Dog's birthday this week so the kids spent an afternoon making lovely posters for Bella. It was all their idea, and a very sweet one at that.

Some other activities that kids did this week included threading beads, exercising finger, hand and arm muscles by picking up little blocks with "clippers", puzzling, and climbed/played on many little snow hills.

By request, we have started learning a little bit about bugs, even though the outdoors is covered in snow. We brainstormed all kinds of bugs we could think of. We have learned the difference between the leg count of an arachnid vs an insect. Some of us were surprised to learn that spiders are not insects. Very neat!

The kids started an Eric Carle themed project, where they explore mark making with varying tools. So far they have used cotton balls on clothespins, string, cups and chopsticks. We'll have to see what tools we can come up with next week!

What a fun outdoor week it has been! We are so lucky to have the nature we have right in our backyard. So much fun was had crazy carpeting, climbing, slipping and sliding on ice, trudging through snow, and experiencing what different types of snow are good for.

Our letters this week were P and B. We played a game where we did actions that start with the letter we are learning ie: Pick plenty play people or poke pink pointy pencils. We also love coming up with sentences comprised of words that stat with the same letter. We definitely get some good giggles out of this activity!

And of course we cannot forget to wish a Happy Birthday to a very special little person! We had fun celebrating and eating mini pies with you!

We honoured Pink Shirt Day this week by wearing a pink shirt and learning what that means, celebrating kind gestures and attitudes, and working on activities that show our understanding or what it means to be kind to all people.

Wrinkled Heart
Compliment circle

The kids and I worked on making a Kindness Tree that shows some of the ideas, written and/or drawn, we thought were kind things to do or say. A lot of work was put into thinking up these ideas, building/taping up the tree, cutting the hearts and writing/drawing the ideas onto the hearts. They sure stuck to it and did an awesome job.

There were a few books surrounding kindness that we really enjoyed;
-Love the World by Todd Parr
-Pink is for Boys by Robb Pearlman and Eda Kaban
-Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss
-Kindness Makes Me Stronger by

Our letters this week were J and D. We had a lot of fun being varying sizes of Jumping Jellybeans. Too funny!

Some other things we did this week included playing with play dough, working on our wooden lion puzzle, discovering a new I Spy type game, and made hot chocolate bombs (and enjoyed eating them too, of course!).

Holy moly, did we ever get some snow! We don't mind the snow, but those temperatures prevented us from enjoying it like we usually do. We will be happy to have more outdoor time next week!