January 27th, 2017

We continued our learning about outer space this past week. We explored Night vs Day by using  a soccer ball to represent the Earth and a flashlight to represent the Sun. By shining the light on the “Earth” we learned how the nighttime and daytime occurs and why the sun doesn’t actually set in the sky but instead the Earth turns away from the sun. Many of us have almost memorized the names of the planets and even their sizes, what they are made of and what order the planets are from the sun. We baked and decorated moon, star and planet cookies, as well as made “Moon Goop” (Oobleck by using 2:1 ratio of corn starch to water) Oobleck changes states based on temperature, from solid to liquid, so you can imagine how puzzling and fun that was to play around in. 

Learning about Chinese New Year was a lot of fun! We spent the last two days of the week making paper Chinese lanterns, making a paper/feather rooster to celebrate the Year of the Rooster, learning what zodiac animal we are, and watch a videos of Lion Dances. We also had a bit of fun pretending to do the Lion Dance by putting blankets over our heads and dancing around.

During our Circle Times we have been working on identifying which numbers belong within larger numbers i.e.: if we count to the number 24, What numbers do we need to write this number? Some of us are really starting to catch on!

Our letter for this week was M. We have been practicing how to write diagonal lines and are doing very well! We built M using our big red lines as well as our letter construction kit. We also made an M for mouse craft.

January 13th, 2017

Snow Snow Snow!

This week we learned about snowflakes; how each snowflakes is unique, what they are made of and where they come from. Everyone practiced their cutting, matching and shape identification through activities including; paper snowflake cutting, building snowmen by matching their colours, searching for shapes within images of snowflakes, and using foam shapes and coloured sticks to create a snowflake pattern. Everyone also did a great job participating and remembering the correct actions in our “5 Little Snowmen” song where each person had one of the five snowmen or the sun, and had to be those particular ‘characters’ through out the song

Our art activities incorporating snowflakes were, melted snowman blow painting, hot glue gunned snowflake resist watercolour painting, ice painting and making popsicle stick snowflakes.

This past week we celebrated a few special 3rd birthdays! We had a bunch of fun making our own ice cream from the snow decorating it with sprinkles and chocolate chips. I don’t know what it is about pets having birthdays that makes the children so excited, but it is very sweet. We made a cat craft that resembled Pan. They did a great job holding and cutting with the scissors in a correct position. It’s not always easy cutting on a curve!

Our letter this week was K. We practiced saying and identifying the sound, thought of many K words (although it was tricky because the letter C also sounds like K), practice building K with our letter construction kit, and made a K is for KING craft where we also wrote that word. We also talked about the “quiet K”, i.e. knee and knife, that seemed quite puzzling to us. Sometimes letters in the English language do not follow the rules.

In addition to our focus on letter K, we played a couple letter identification games. For the first one I would call a letter and they would have to identify and erase the correct one on the whiteboard. For the second game, everyone searched for a letter that was called, then matched their capital letter to the corresponding lowercase letter. We also had a bit of fun choosing the coloured plate we would be having for our afternoon snack; they had to tell me the colour that starts with a specific sound/letter, to get their plate.

We had some really wonderful questions come up this week, that we discussed. While singing one of our morning songs I was asked “why are the kids not falling off the Earth?” (within and mage of multiple children were holding hands around the Earth). So we talked about gravity and how gravity holds keeps s from floating away like we would in space; thats why when we jump we land back on the ground. Then I was asked what gravity looks like; it’s invisible. More interesting questions came about after we did some exercises that brought our heart rate up; why blood is purple inside our body but red when it comes out, what is the job of the heart, and why our heart pumps faster when we exercise. Great questions!