It's Earth Day! We need to make our planet a healthier place so we picked up garbage on the way to the park. And learned that we can keep things out of the landfill by recycling them and using them for other things. One child said to me that Ms. Audra recycles. I asked her how do I recycle? She said that we use yogurt cups to hold paint and to play with in the pretend kitchen. Great connection!

Later that day we did some journaling about Earth Day. Some drew the Earth, with garbage and some with it all cleaned up. Some drew garbage and recycling cans. And some drew themselves cleaning up garbage.

This week we focused on what plants need to grow. When asked what plants need to grow everyone knew WATER right away. So we found all of the plants that were inside and took turns watering them. We also figured out how to tell if a plant needed watering and what happens to a plant when it doesn’t get the water it needs. We compared the leaves/petals of a well-watered plant and a water-deprived plant. After learning how much plants need water, we cut and coloured a watering can and attached little water droplets to the spout.

We next learned that plants need soil to grow. We took our pretend paper pots outside and found dirt to add. Using a syringe and spray bottle, we dropped and sprayed food coloured water onto coffee filters. The coloured coffee filters turned into beautiful flowers to attach to our crafted dirt filled flower pot.

The next day we buckled our seat belts on our imaginary Magic School Bus and headed to the back yard to plant our own seeds. While doing this we learned that plants need their own space to grow. The seeds cannot be too close together when planted. Outside is where our seeds will get the sun and air they need to grow as well. Now to wait and see what happens!

Some other things we did this week include; writing letters with our fingers in salt trays, writing numbers on the sidewalk and then erasing them using a water spray bottle, playing a letter matching game, and building Mat Man.
We used colourful ribbons to thread paper flowers. Everyone has shown more patience and confidence in trying things that are not easily mastered.

We also practiced using a hula hoop and played a letter game where you pick a letter from the bucket, identify it and it’s sound, and run across the field to drop in into a hula hoop. Which hula hoop ended up with more or less letters by the end of the game?

We even made our own playdough!

And we cannot forget about our new special leader day task; reading a story from home to our friends. Everyone has been working really hard at created a comprehensive story by reading what is happening in the images. It is great to hear that they know they can read! Just because you may not know the words quite yet, does not mean you cannot read. I hope to see them carry this confidence through as they start to learn how to read the words of a story. We have started to talk about the parts of a story; the beginning, the problem and the solution. This is something we will continue as we move into some more creative storytelling.
 
Can’t wait for next week!
Xoxo Miss Audra

We started off our week with a science experiment to see what would happen when we put white flowers into coloured water. It was neat to see how the flower petals changed colour in only a day, and that the darkest colour changed the flower first. That was an interesting observation. Later in the week we recorded this science experiment in our journals. We wonder if this experiment would turn out differently if we used different flowers; we used carnations.
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How great the weather has been! We have been taking our number work outdoors this week, identifying and writing them with chalk. We created a hop scotch to write, identify and sequence number, as well as to practice hoping. We also played a game where we wrote the numbers 1-10 on the sidewalk, tossed a pinecone on a number, identified the number and then proceeded to do an action that many times.

We have been doing a bunch of nature exploring this week! Climbing hills and over rocks, walking through and playing around the trees. Our balance sure was tested and we had to truly pay attention to our surroundings.

We have been hoping for rain this week, so the new plants and tree leaves can grow and so we can go outside and play in the puddles. Unfortunately it doesn’t rain very often in Calgary, so we sang rain songs and created a patterned umbrella instead. To make our patterned umbrellas we had to figure out which two colours we wanted for our pattern and ask for the two colours that, when mixed together, will create it. We’re getting really good as remembering which colours can mix to make other colours!

We did a process art activity this week where everyone was given some tools and materials to work with, but what they created was up to them. They used paint, toothbrushes, sponges, toothpicks, etc. The results are quite neat, as some chose to brush, stamp, smudge, mix colours, not mix colours, swirl in circles, etc.

We used pre-drawn flowers to glue and place yarn onto, to make our very own fluffy flowers. We also had a lot of fun using one of our Mystery Bag items to paint with; a YAM. The yam was cut into different shapes and was used to stamp with paint.

We had our last Mystery Bag leaders this past week. We had a lot of fun trying to guess what everyone brought, and have a lot of work to show for it. Mystery Bag not only helped us to practice writing our letters, but it also gave us practice asking logical questions and connecting the dots between the answer to the questions and asking of the next question. Mystery Bag also helped us to practice identifying letter sounds of specific letters and words; this helped us to learn how to spell the word that was guessed and to recognize that some guesses of the Mystery Bag object were incorrect because they didn’t sound like the letter for that day. This experience also allowed us to practice drawing what we see; looking for shapes we know and correctly positioning parts of the object in our drawings.
 
Oh and we cannot forget about how much baking we did this week! We baked muffins for our morning snacks, but also baking cookies to celebrate Zac’s birthday. The kids were very excited to make birthday posters for Zac; they got to practice sounding out his name and each had a turn to write the letters. He most exciting part was for them to hide and then jump out for the SURPRISE! Cute!

Can’t wait to see what next week brings!

Xoxo Miss Audra

We are so happy for the warm weather! Picnic snacks are great and Nosehill Park is always a fun adventure in this weather. This time we went in a direction we had never gone before and stumbled upon a tipi made from tree branches that someone had built within the trees. With all the fallen tree branches around, we decided to contribute to the tipi building ourselves. What fun! We also came across something you do not see every day…a porcupine den. Which led to an important conversation about respecting wildlife, as we respect the other parts of nature. It was quite an exciting this to come across.

This week we continued our Spring Mural by adding ladybugs and ants. We listened to a story called “Bugs Bugs Bugs” by Bob Barner to learn a few things about these tiny creatures. We learned that ladybugs are beetles, that they can have little or many spots, and that they can be yellow, orange or red. Ants are very strong and always use teamwork to accomplish tasks much like we do at school.

We worked a lot with numbers and math concepts this week; identifying, representing and writing numbers, as well as patterning. We used a salt tray to practice writing numbers that our friends showed us. They sure like to have a chance to be the one to tell their friends what numbers to write with their little fingers. They crafted a paper lady bug whose wings can move to reveal the number that reflects the amount of dots on its’ wings. Little fingers were put to work to twist pipe cleaners to a paper plate sun in a pattern, to form the sun rays. We all thought that flowers were an important part of spring so we finger painted flower petals onto a stem to represent the correct number below. Everyone worked on creating their own two part colour pattern to act as the body of a bumble bee, on which they wrote the letters of their name.

We are getting so close to completing our Mystery Bag letters. This week we had letters S-W.  Everyone is doing so well identifying the beginning letter of varying words. We sure do enjoy singing our letter song! Their confidence in identifying letters they hear at the beginning, and most times in the middle, of words is increasing. They are so proud when they identify the sounds correctly. Great job to them!

See everyone next week!
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Xoxo Miss Audra

Spring has sprung!
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We explored Nosehill Park using our senses to find signs of spring, such as; plants starting to grow, buds on the trees, moss, bugs, and chirping birds. The view was also amazing and we were all excited that we could see familiar places for so high up!

Everyone has been working hard to create a Spring time mural that is so big it is even taller than we are! It is still a work in progress and it looking superb! Before we started the mural we had to think of all the things we thought of when we thought of spring. So many wonderful ideas. We practiced cutting diagonal lines to create grass and cut out flowers with stems. We learned that primary colours mixed together will make the colour brown, so we could paint a tree. Buds are growing on this tree. We ripped coloured paper to make a rainbow that comes after the rain from the clouds we cut out. The concept of symmetry was introduced when we painted only one side of a butterfly and then folded the paper in half to transfer the paint to the other side. Very neat!

The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle was a popular story this week. We made a caterpillar using paper circles. We needed to count the proper number circles we needed to spell our name and plus one for the caterpillar’s head. On the back of each circle we also practiced writing the numbers to match the amount of circles we had.

Now that spring time weather is here, and hopefully here to stay, we have been spending more time outside. More adventures, more exercise, more fresh air!

See everyone next week!

Xoxo Miss Audra