It's raining colours! We have been learning where rain comes from, and when/why its falls. We did two science experiments this week that helped us with this. For the first experiment we placed a paper plate full of ice onto a half filled jar or hot water. We made our own rain (condensation)! For the second experiment, we dripped food colouring on top of a shaving cream cloud. The coloured rain did not drop right away because the cloud had to fill up first! It was very fascinating and there was so much excitement when the cloud dropped its first bit of coloured rain.

We have been talking a lot about weather this week, so we decided to make weather puppets and create a story about weather. The stories we created helped us to make sense of how different types of weather occur.

We wanted to see the clouds a little bit closer up, so we made our own binoculars so we could see the pictures in the clouds. We also enjoyed noticing the people, dogs and cars in the far off distance with them as well.

This week, we reviewed what it means to be a Bucket Filler and all the different ways we can be one. We wrote them on little buckets, cut them out and hung them from our big cloud so the pretend rain would fill them up. 

We have been practicing our capitol letter formations using a salt tray and the Handwriting Without Tears terminology. With the consistent use of familiar terms to explain how to form letters, they have been better able to write letters by just listening to me explain it to them. We started with big line/little line and big/little curve, and how we always start our letters at the top. Now we are understanding the top vs middle vs bottom and what a diagonal line is and how to use them in conjunction with the above.

I was asked a very interesting question this week; what happens when you put a marker in hot water? So we tried it out. It came as a surprise to us that the marker ink turned the water red and the marker tip was now white!
Some other things we did this week include; using dice to practice rolling, identifying and representing numbers with cotton ball clouds, using puzzles to work with rhyming words (identifying the rhyming sound and/or matching the last letters of the words to find a rhyme), and practiced how to throw a large Frisbee.

Starting the week of March 7th, Mystery Bag will be replacing Show and Tell. Each day the special leader will bring an object that begins with their assigned letter. It is going to be our job to ask the leader questions about their object, so that we can guess what it is they brought. This will help us continue to build our questioning skills and connecting clues.
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See everyone next week!
Xoxo Miss Audra

We made our own cloud! Wow!

Last week’s fog inspired this week’s theme of clouds. We read the story “Little Cloud” by Eric Carle, that shows us how fun using your imagination to search for pictures in the sky can be. Unfortunately, our clouds this past week have not been the best for this…we will try again next week!

There were so many activities about clouds for us to do! We used homemade cotton ball paintbrushes to paint clouds and learned how to estimate the amount of clouds (cotton balls) in a jar. For letter practice we used cotton balls to create the letter C for CLOUD, made a cloud that lifts like a flap book, with the fluffy cotton ball cloud on one side and the word CLOUD written on the inside, as well as created a cloud with the letters of our names dangling on rain drops.

Everyone is getting much more confident when identifying or attempting to identify the sounds they hear in the words they want to write in their journals. 

We practiced building squares and rectangles with blocks, counting the blocks to figure out if the sides were equal or not. We have also been working on identifying, writing and representing numbers 1-20 using Base 10 blocks as a way to organize our counting. We are beginning to identify real life patterns that we sometimes don’t normally notice, ie: this week the boy girl pattern was noticed within our line when heading outside.

We are so thankful for all the good weather we have had this winter. It is amazing that we were able to have a picnic lunch this Friday…in February! Everyone helped out to make their own sandwiches and package up all of the fruit and veggies.

With all of this warm weather, we took a particular interest in kicking soccer balls around to each other and running races. We on working on what it means to be a “good sport” whether you win or lose.
 
I hope everyone is having a good weekend! See you all next week!
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Xoxo Miss Audra

Our Chinese New Year celebrations ended of just as good as they started. We celebrated our last day by making our own good fortune packets, and celebrating a very special 4th birthday. Birthdays are always a fun time; everyone loves baking and eating cupcakes. Not only is baking fun but it teaches us to read and count numbers as we measure, be patient while others have turns mixing ingredients and see what happens when certain ingredients are mixed together.

Show and Tell continues to excite everyone! After the Show and Tell has been shared, we all have the opportunity to ask a question and give a comment about the object shown, to gain a better understanding of why a particular object is so special. We are starting to comprehend the difference between a question and a comment. It is nice to hear that the questions asked are becoming more considered and thoughtful.

Valentine’s Day is all about being thoughtful and loving towards others, so we talked about the meaning of Valentine’s Day; particularly how we can show love to our friends and family. There were many great ideas including sharing and using kind words…even making breakfast together. We started off our Valentine’s celebrations by working as a team to hunt down all the tiny hidden hearts. The emphasis was not to find more hearts than everyone else, but to work together to find the hearts and to solve clues to find the tricky ones. Once the hearts were found (we were always amazed at how many hearts we continued to find throughout the day, after our hunt was over! I’m sure there are still some lingering around.) each of us lined up our hearts, counted them, and then we compared the amounts we had; working on how to recognize more/less and most/least. We had so much fun with this game and wanted to play it every day this week.

Another hit this week was our Valentine’s science experiment. We used smaller tools to drop red vinegar onto baking soda hearts. It was quite neat to see the hearts sizzle. We also had lots of practice using our little fingers to manipulate craft materials. We created Valentine necklaces by using a hole punch to pop holes into foam hearts and threaded them onto yarn. We also made a Love Bug where we practiced our cutting, threading and twisting pipe cleaners. So many crafts this week! Each of us making a heart person was quite fun to see; we folded paper arms and legs into accordions and cut out a heart body. These heart people turned into superheroes, cats and depictions of our families.

Some additional things we did this week include drawing and writing in our creative journals, forming the uppercase and lowercase versions of the beginning letter of our names, threading pipe cleaners through holes in a paper heart and adding beads to a heart made of glue to create a delicate beaded heart.

Let’s not forget about the warm weather we had at the beginning of the week. Sun is always nice to have and is good for us all. It’s great to be outside more often. Everyone sure had fun! Even when it was suddenly frosty we still had fun!
   
I hope everyone is having a wonderful Family Day weekend!
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Xoxo Miss Audra

Show and Tell was off to a great start this week. There were some very special things brought and everyone did a great job treating them with care. During Show and Tell everyone has the opportunity to ask questions and give comments. Right now we are working on the difference between a question and a comment.

This past week we learned about and celebrated Chinese New Year. We learned that long ago, according to legend there was a monster named Nian, whose name means year, that would come to scare everyone on the night of the new moon. Many years later a wise man taught them the 3 things Nian was afraid of; loud noises, fire and the colour red. These things keep Nian away, and now the new moon is celebrated.

To celebrate Chinese New Year we created many arts and crafts. We started with colouring and cutting out our own Nian and gluing it to a piece of red paper that folded over and over to form and accordion. We had lots of fun pretending to be a Nian, like the costumed ones we see in parades and festivals, and preform a Lion Dance. The performers of the Lion Dances are very skilled at dancing and balancing without fully seeing where they are going. For us, being under a large sheet with nowhere to look accept to the feet of the person in front of you can be quite tricky but we learned how to dance and follow each other’s feet very well. It was really sweet seeing them pretend to go to China and be Nians during their free play time as well.
This year is the year of the Monkey, so we made monkey masks and celebrated with origami paper Chinese lanterns. We also made a frame out of popsicle sticks for our Chinese name.

This week we also continued to learn about more about penguins. We pretended to be a daddy penguin keeping the egg warm before it hatches. It proved to be quite tricky to hold an egg (stuffy) between your legs and waddle like a penguin does (holding the large pillow to represent the girth of a penguin). We had a great time going penguin sliding down the hill at the park this week! And we made a torn paper penguin craft.
 
This week we also re-visited our rotting food science experiment from last week. This involved drawing what we see, ie: shapes that build the object, and sounding out words in order to label each of the 3 types of food we have been observing.

Can’t wait to see what this coming week holds!

Xoxo Miss Audra