Happy St. Patrick’s Week
 
Our week was full of talk surrounding rainbows and leprechauns. We learned what the 7 colours of the rainbow are and what order that show up in. We spent a good portion of our week working on the various stages of our rainbow arts process. At first, we talked about what we wanted to use to make a rainbow and the 3 ideas that came to were crayons, paint and water. Crayons came first, paint came second and on the third day came the pouring/splashing water on food-coloured drops and working together to lift and drop the canvas to control where the water went. 
 
We put out the rainbow for the Leprechaun to find...He left us some green and gold coins! The kids ran to and from the rainbow with specific quantities of coins and then they worked on sorting, counting and comparing how many gold and green coins were left.
 
The kids worked on their number counting, recognition and fine motor practice when they clipped the number that matched the quantity of St. Patrick’s Day pictures on the card. They also matching numbers with the same quantity of dots to connect both halves of a rainbow.
 
Our letters this week were R and K. The kids worked on building letter R with various items and worked on drawing diagonal lines for letter K.
 
The game of choice to played was Cupcake Toppers. Great for a birthday celebration day. These guys are getting pretty great at figuring out what letters words start with... even the words that begin with vowels!
 
The kids also worked in their journals about St. Patrick’s Day. And we went on our first longer adventure to make birthday goodie bag deliveries for the children not attending the day of the very special 4th birthday we were celebrating, who are also somewhat within walking distance. It was a fun day!

We are big fans of Nemo and Dori, but never knew the types of fish they were! 
 
This week was all about Clown Fish and Sea Anemone. We learned about the Clown Fish lifecycle, the many different types of Clown Fish (and also what type of fish Dori is), and the symbiotic relationship between Clown Fish and Sea Anemone. 
 
The kids made tape resist Clown Fish paintings, cut with fancy scissors to make stripes for their orange and white striped paper clown fish, and made a Clown Fish that popped out and danced between a cut paper cup Sea Anemone.
 
Our letters this week were P and B. The kids are getting quite good at figuring out words that begin with certain letter sounds! When we brainstormed words that start with B, they ran all over the house trying to find as many objects that started with B as possible.
 
We played a math game that involved rolling a dice (numbered, dotted or number word) and threading the number of beads their dice roll told them to. Someone even decided to challenge herself by choosing the number word dice. Way to go!
 
We cannot forget that it was Bella dog’s birthday this week (I don’t think the kids would let me)! We celebrated with making a paper Bella dog, singing her happy birthday and giving her treats.
 
Some other things we did this week include creating with Velcro covered coloured sticks, Dancing to a few GoNoodle videos (they love doing this!) and practiced their hand at “baseball” using sticks (it looks like I may need to add some children’s baseball equipment to our outdoor play bucket).

Sea Cucumbers are the one of the strangest animals of the sea! We learned quite a few interesting facts about them. They have no eyes, nose, ears, bones or brain. They have ring around their ‘mouth’ that guides their behaviour, they are the earthworms of the sea, they have these little tree-like tentacles coming from their mouth that help gather bacteria for them to ‘eat’, and they expel their toxic guts from their anus when predators are near and regrow them later. The kids truly enjoyed learning about the odd and sometimes funny facts about sea cucumbers!
 
Our letters this week were J and D. The kids practiced these letters by writing them on the whiteboard and building them with magnets and wooden pieces. Letter identification and letter sounds were practiced through mini puzzles, and our “cupcake topper” kit. With the cupcake topper kit the kids could pick a picture of something ie: dog, figure out what letter it starts with and add that to the top of the cupcake as well, or even spell out the word (which we did as a group too).
 
Some of the other activities we did this week include;
-Sea Cucumber journal drawing
-the Skittles experiment
-Play dough fun