Happy Earth Day! 
 
We hope you all did a little something to help out our home this week; the kids sure did! They sorted garbage, recycling and compost materials into the right bins, and cleaned toy animals after an “oil” spill. 
 
We had a lot of in-depth discussions about what helps the Earth and what makes it unhealthy. We played a Good Earth Bad Earth game where they had to look at a picture and decide if it belonged on the good or bad side. 
 
Our Earth drawing got a lot of use this week. It started off being used for sorting and placing green and blue cubes to represent the land and water. Then, by request of another, other coloured cubes were added to represent garbage on Earth, of which they had to then remove with “clippers” as they like to call them.
 
Holy Moly, did we ever get a lot of snow this week! We had plenty of fun shoveling, making snowmen (great team work on this one! The snowmen made were quite large!), making snow angels, digging out snow houses, etc. 
 
Our letters this week were M and N.
 
The big kids worked on the “op” word family. There was lots of fun to be had acting out “op” word family scenarios, and the kids did a great job looking at a picture and writing the “op” word beside it!
 
And we cannot forget a very special 3rd birthday to our littlest!

Happy Easter! I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend with their families.
 
There was much excitement to be had the week leading up to Easter. The kids did so many Easter egg hunt activities in preparation. They told me that they were really good egg hunters now, so they can find even the well-hidden eggs when the Easter Bunny came. The kids hunted coloured eggs to then sort, group, count, compare and do some addition, and they hunted eggs that contained letters and numbers to then identify and write on the board.
 
The kids made Easter sticker patterns using colour and/or shape in ABAB, AAB, ABC and AABB ways. They also played a roll the dice and trace game where they had to roll the dice and read the number to figure out which letter or line they had to trace.
 
Did you know that you can be a bunny and eat while you paint? That’s what the kids did! They were given a carrot, paint and paper. They ended up with some cute little paintings and half eaten carrots. Too funny! The kids also used cardboard tubes to paint a variety of pictures with ie; bunnies, eggs, flowers, abstract. 
 
Our letters this week were A and K. The kids did letter hunt and puzzle activities. The big kids, with the help of the little kids, started their work on the “op” word family. We all had a great time doing the actions to many “op” words, and also making stories with them because we really enjoy doing this!

Easter is on its way! And we cannot wait!
 
We learned a bit about what bunnies do all day (inspired by a book we read), and read and re-read Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter multiple times! 
 
The kids went on two Easter egg hunts; the first was to find eggs that contained letters that they then had to write on the board, and the second was to hunt for eggs they then had to sort, count, and write the number next to the correct colour word.
 
We worked on the letter R by doing a letter R puzzle, singing, and making actions to Row Row Row Your Boat. This ended up taking us into learning about different types of boats you can row with an oar or paddle and how to row them in a way to go straight. We had bum-scooting rowboat races on the wood floor and some of us couldn’t stop giggling when pretending to only row on one side of the boat, therefore going in circles. 
 
We reviewed “at” words with rotating plastic Easter eggs which were then written on the board in the sentence they belonged to. After each team read their sentence, the whole group acted out that particular “at” word.
 
The kids also “planted” capital letter carrots into lowercase letter dirt and painted tape resist paper Easter eggs.
 
We started reading Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren in the last couple of weeks and are finding Pippi Longstocking to be such a silly girl! We cannot wait to see what happens next!

What better way to finish off our chapter book than to celebrate with a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory themed party! This book by Roald Dahl was one of the most asked for read alouds every day. Some days during rest time they just wanted to get to reading our chapter of the day. We had loads of fun this week!
 
We did many chocolate and candy themed activities such as:
-Melting chocolate into moulds
-I made Fizzy Lifting Drink and they were not surprised to see that their bodies lifted into the air! They thought that part was really great!
-Finger painting with melted chocolate.
-I made Lickable Wallpaper by adding a tad bit of water to one side of a fruit roll up treat and sticking it to parchment paper. What fun that was to watch them!
-They played a Golden Ticket letter match game and sorted/counted/compared tiny candy colouring they did previously. 
-Candy themed colouring pages
-And we can’t forget the chocolate cereal with the chocolate milk!
 
We also learned how chocolate is made. There are so many steps!
 
A big thank you to all the families that provided chocolatey treats for our day!