Happy Easter everyone! We were all very excited to celebrate Easter this past week. The most exciting of all was our PJ Day and Easter Egg hunt. Everyone was in charge of finding a set of eggs that were all the same colour. And it is always so fun to come to school wearing your PJ’s and to see the PJ’s your friends are wearing.

Little Easter bunnies helped us to practice counting, number recognition/representation and even some subtraction. We sang and danced to “5 little bunnies” every day this past week and most of us are able to understand the concept that taking away something decreases the amount present. It also helped us to practice counting backwards. We also identified numbers on the colourful bunnies and tried to find the matching quantity of Easter eggs.  Everyone has been practicing hard to not count the same object twice, as we are working on counting in an organized/orderly/left to right fashion so we are not pointing to and counting objects in many different directions.

In continuing with our Easter theme, we cut, glued, drew, and painted some super cute Easter crafts such as; paper plate Easter bunnies, shape bunnies where they created a bunny using a singular shape we have been learned (We learned a new shape called a parallelogram…tricky to say!), and watercolour painted paper Easter eggs.

Some of our Mystery Bag items have been tricky this time. Key, Light, M&Ms and Nickel. Everyone continues to do a wonderful job asking questions to gain clues about what the Mystery Bag item is, as well as drawing the item using shapes we know and writing the letter using the proper formations we have been learning. I now hear some children using the handwriting terminology step by step as they write their names each day; great to hear!
                                 
In addition to Mystery Bag we have been practicing letters and the sounds they make through games such as an Alphabet match, where we have to take foam letters and find the corresponding letter on the floor to match them with.

Each day we spend some time reading stories to ourselves and each other. The creativity of their oral stories produced by referencing the pictures is quite something. I used to hear “I can’t read” but now they can feel confident that they can read because they can create their own story to follow the pictures. It surprises them sometimes when they can identify small words, or parts of words that they now recognize.
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A few interesting notes for the week:
1) On our way back from the park we found a worm on the sidewalk. The way he coiled and uncoiled was fascinating. We named him Squishy.
2) One day everyone decided that they were going to dance like princes and princesses, gowns and all. The seriousness they had when dancing made it seem like they were taking part in a dancing competition.
3) A huge tree branch was found at the park. This gave us a chance to see how heavy tree branches are, what colour and texture they have, and what they look like under the first layer of bark.

I hope everyone is having a wonderful Easter!
Xoxo Miss Audra

We were all a little green this week! Green for St. Patrick’s Day!

On St.Patrick’s Day we baked Irish bread, decorated cookies, made a green leprechaun drink and wore funny little hats. We had a fun afternoon!

There were many St. Patrick’s Day festivities throughout the week.  We went on a scavenger hunt to find gold coins. We then evenly distributed them to everyone and played a BINGO sort of game where we had to listen for the number called and if we had that number we had to put that coin in the pile. We also used our fingers and green paint to create shamrocks to represent certain numbers from 1-10.

We practiced our fine motor skills cutting, hole punching and threading our own paper shamrock. It we also quite fun to add glitter! We also had a lot of fun turning shaving cream green and painting a picture with it. It is quite different painting with a thick substance and having to wear a glove on your hand.

We went on an adventure to find our very own special Blarney stone so we could paint it. If you kiss your Blarney Stone it will give you good luck!
This week’s most exciting science experiment was mixing the colours red and blue in a jar of water to see what would happen. We took turns adding drops of food colouring into the jar, and watched as it slowly mixed itself together before our eyes. We then had lots of fun playing with our new purple water, using different sized containers, syringes and scoops.

We went on a letter scavenger hunt that we all helped to put together. We all worked as a team to help each other find each find 3 or 4 letters. We then used the ABC song to help us sequence the letters of the alphabet. This was a great way to connect and match the name of the letter to the letter itself. Everyone has been working really hard at identifying letters they hear in words; we built words using letter pieces, by listening to what sounds we heard when we said a particular word.

Mystery Bag has been quite exciting this week! Everyone has now mastered the routine of Mystery Bag; asking and responding to direct questions, drawing what was in the Mystery Bag using familiar shapes, writing the uppercase and lowercase letter the Mystery Bag object started with, and sounding out/writing the word of the object together as a team. Sometimes it can be tricky to keep the Mystery Bag a secret!

Everyone is doing so well! I can’t wait to see our Mystery Bag’s this coming week!
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Xoxo Miss Audra

From clouds we move to rainbows and St. Patrick’s Day. Where do rainbows comes from, was the question we asked. We learned they come from the sky and the clouds after it rains. Too bad Calgary isn’t getting very much rain this season. Everyone created a torn paper rainbow as well as a rainbow that has each letter of their name on a different colour within the rainbow. Last week the concept of bar graphing was introduced and this week we made a bar graph to see who was wearing which colours of the rainbow. 

This we chose the colour green to experiment with, as green is the colour of St. Patrick’s Day. We used our green and white paint to see how we could make varying greens. And then we painted our shamrocks with these greens. 
Did you know that you can find a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow?! It’s not so easy to find the end of a rainbow. When the kids heard this they were determined to find this pot of gold…if only we had a rainbow that day. Instead of real gold we opted for pretend gold coins. We worked together to hunt for as many gold coins as we could. We then worked in partners to identify and put the numbered coins in the proper sequence from 1-20. 

Mystery Bag has been off to a great start! Each day a different person brings an object that starts with their assigned letter, and we have to ask questions to figure out what it is they brought. After each Mystery Bag we practice writing the letter the object starts with and we draw it; identifying and replicating shapes, sizes and colours we see. 
 
Some other things we did this week include using clothespins to identify and sequence numbers, using a straw to blow BIG bubbles and visiting Nose Hill Park. It’s a great place to adventure. We even found deer hairs. And of course we ran through the tunnel screaming as loud as we could on the way back!

We’re super excited for St. Patrick’s Day celebrations this week! 
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See everyone real soon.
Xoxo Miss Audra

Last week we learned a bunch about clouds and rain, and this week we finish up this topic by creating artwork and learning new math concepts. Children were given an Introduction to bar graphing. Because we have been learning about clouds and weather, we made a bar graph of everyone's favourite type of weather. We practiced our number identification and representation by reading a number from a cloud and making the cloud rain the appropriate number of felt rain drops.

Previously, we talked about identifying pictures in the clouds (we used our binoculars to do so) and this week we created our own picture in the clouds by using a Q-Tip to draw in a cloud of white paint. It was a lot of fun trying to guess what each other’s picture was. We also created cloud people by cutting out a cloud shape (everyone is getting so good at cutting on a curve!) and folding rectangular pieces of construction paper like an accordion to create the legs and arms. The cloud people also held lightning and rain in their hands.

An additional artwork created this week was a process painting where children were given paintbrushes, kitchen sponges, cotton balls and toothbrushes to paint a picture using two colours.

It was wonderful to be able to spend so much time outside! We met new friends at the park and played with multiple pieces of sports equipment (golf, catch, soccer). We took our letter practice outside; we played a game where the goal was to run to a letter and identify it. They would then collect all the letters they correctly identified. We took a long walk on an adventure to find a new park to visit for the day where we found a park with a dinosaur to play on! And we were lucky enough to witness bunnies “fighting” in the fields. What an exciting afternoon that was!

We continue our routines of practicing our letter sounds in words and writing within our journals, identifying weather, recording the temperature, identifying the days of the week, and counting during our Circle time activities. We have adopted a couple new routines over this past week; the first is counting how long it takes each to try for the bathroom before we go outside (practicing proper number sequence when counting larger numbers) and the second is identifying a letter and its sound before going to eat lunch.

Exciting note: Some of us are beginning to take notice of “at” words with in stories we read!

It has been such a wonderful week and so we had a special treat day. Boy were they surprised!
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See everyone soon!
Xoxo Miss Audra