It’s Magic! We completed our learning on the butterfly lifecycle this week with our salt and water colour painting. The look of amazement on everyone’s faces is quite cute when they see the water colour paint spread so quickly on the salt. We also made butterflies using painted hand prints for the wings and pom poms for the thorax, which we learned is the body.

Our letters this week were G and H. For the letter G we decorated a capital G and wrote/drew our favourite G word. For the letter H we cut out and decorated butterfly hats, since hat starts with an H. Everyone is getting so good at practicing their letter sounds! Not only do we try to find words that start with our focus letter, but we also practice identifying the sounds in words we see and often want to figure out how to spell words of anything we can think of. Some of us have even been practicing sight words (basic words used frequently).

We have been playing a lot of Alphabet Hide and Find, where we work together to hide letters around and then find each other’s letters. We then identify the letter, the letter sound and match them to a letter sheet we see. It’s a load of fun trying to find friend’s letters! And we can’t forget our new Letter Construction set where we get build letters according to the instructions on the given.

Our Estimation Jars have been going very well. We only have one week of Estimation Jars left! This week we have seen coins from around the world, magnetic trains (How come some trains won't go together? We talked about how you need two opposite magnets to go together, because two of the same pushes each other away.), ponytails (lining up colours into lines to see which has more or less.), Crayons (laying them out in groups of two. Introducing them to counting by twos (count a number, skip a number)).
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We found a few neat things on our outside adventures this week including large amounts of ant hills, dandelion seeds and trees that have different types of pinecones at varying stages of growth (some red, brown or sappy). A little while ago we learned about how ants are really strong and work as a team to get things done. We found a dead fly that many ants were carrying away into their ant hill. It was quite the sight!

We cannot forget about our visit to the dinosaur park this week…we had one of our little ones come out from her house to play with us for a little while. It was great to see her on a day she is not usually with us!

See everyone soon!

Xoxo Miss Audra

“Butterfly, egg, caterpillar, chrysalis” ...was part of the butterfly lifecycle song we have been singing all week. It has helped us to remember the order of each stage. The home that caterpillars create to become a butterfly has been quite intriguing to us this week. We learned that to make the chrysalis the caterpillar has to hang upside down and hold its body in the shape of a “J”. We watched a time lapse video of a caterpillar creating a chrysalis and then coming out of it as a butterfly. It was fascinating to watch this metamorphosis! We colour dyed and used different types of pastas to represent each of the stages of the butterfly lifecycle. We then used the leftover pastas to create our own unique artwork. Some of us wrote the letter B for butterfly and decorated that, where others created a garden for the butterflies and caterpillars to live.

Learning about the chrysalis stage was a bunch of fun! We all took turns pretending to be a caterpillar in a chrysalis by having our friends wrap us up in toilet paper, then helping us to emerge as a beautiful butterfly. It was very cute watching all of the new little butterflies flying around outside!

In following this week’s theme, we practiced pattern making by building a coloured pompom caterpillar, and revisiting the concept of symmetry by cutting out a half a paper butterfly to open it and reveal a full butterfly shape. We then collaged tissue paper pieces for the butterfly’s wings, added a popsicle stick for the body and pipe cleaners for the antennae.

This week we have been continuing our Estimation Jars. We figured out over the week that if an object is bigger the amount will be less, and if the object is smaller there can be a lot more of them.  We have seen buttons, wine corks, cereal and Lego. We were able to practice counting, and sorting by colour and size. The Lego was tricky to estimate because all the pieces were different sizes. Everyone built something and then each counted how many Lego pieces it took to build.

Some other things we did this week include journaling outdoors and writing and brainstorming words that start with the letters “F” and “G”.

I hope everyone’s having a great May long weekend despite the rainy weather.
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Xoxo Miss Audra

“The Very Hungry Caterpillar” by Eric Carle was our focus this week. We are learning about how caterpillars form a chrysalis and turn into butterflies. The concept is quite fascinating. Just saying the word metamorphosis is tricky, and kind of funny too. We finger painted our own caterpillar to represent the one in the story. We used images from the book to show the story sequence in the proper order. Some of us have sharp memories! In the story the caterpillar eats quite a lot of junk food and this posed a great time to discuss the importance of eating healthy; while eating treats is okay, we cannot do it all the time. Knowing this we connected the dots and realized that the caterpillar’s tummy felt better about eating a nice green leaf because that’s where it gets its’ nutrients from. Smart thinking! We used our fingerprints to make a caterpillar that represented the number that we read on the paper. Each caterpillar turned out to be different lengths because of this. We also practice addition by adding together the circles of the two caterpillars to make a whole new, larger one.
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This week we started our Estimation Jars for our special leader day. Little People were in our first Estimation Jar. We talked about what an estimation is and how we can take a guess that makes sense. We then counted them and organized them into many different groups such as; boys/girls/animals, colour of hats and the career each of the Little People may belong to.
We have been working hard on writing our numbers and representing them in different ways. Everyone really likes to use laminated number sheets where they have to read/write the number and represent it using Base 10 blocks and drawing little sprinkles on the cupcake. They love that when they clear their laminated sheet with a wet paper towel it turns the colour of the marker they use.

Some other things we did this week include; word work with the letter E (this was much harder to brainstorm words for than the previous letters), used numbered clothespins to create the proper number sequence, painted using Q-Tips and baked muffins of course!

See everyone soon!

Xoxo Miss Audra

What a hot and cool week it was! One day we were eating popsicles and the next we had our hoods up on our jackets.

This week was all about Mother’s Day. We spent a bunch of the week preparing our special surprises for mom. Everyone even helped to wrap their gifts! We started off with an accordion style Mother’s Day card where we practiced writing letters and tearing paper. It has been amazing to see how much their letter writing has grown!  Some of us built cardboard frames to decorate for a picture that was later drawn about mom and/or family. Everyone created a paper plate flower basket and put tissue paper flowers inside. They sure were busy this past week, and they all did an amazing job!

This week we made maracas to celebrate Cinco de Mayo. We used our maracas to dance to some Cinco de Mayo songs. Fun!

We had a special salmon cooking lesson from Zac. They loved to “paint” the salmon with the mixture that went on top.

On our adventure at Nosehill Park there was a lady who told us that she saw a deer in the trees. The kids asked me how come we can’t see it? One child said that “maybe it is brown so it matches the trees”. This was a great chance to talk about how and why animals camouflage into their surroundings.

This past week we have been focusing on words that start with the letter C and D. Each day we find more and more words. We fill up our entire whiteboard! After we listen to a letter song we brainstorm words that start with the letter that day. After a couple days of thinking about these words we write our favourite word and create something to represent it in our journal.

Some of the other activities we did this week include; building letters with a letter construction kit and journaling our lima bean plant observations. We needed to open the Ziploc bag because it needed space to continue growing!

Can’t wait to see what this coming week holds.
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Xoxo Miss Audra

L,ast week we planted our first seeds and they are now starting to sprout! It has been amazing to see that in the past few days the sprout has gone from hardly visible to about an inch and a half tall. We recorded this growth in our journals at six days. We look forward to seeing how much they grow this coming week!

While we are waiting for our flowers to grow we have taken lima bean seeds and planted those in wet cotton balls. I was asked if it was going to grow or not, because it did not have any soil, and based on what we have been learning about what a plant needs to grow that was a very good question. So we waited a couple days and the lima bean seeds started to grow roots! I was told that the lima bean was growing much faster than the flower plants were. Very true.

On one of the beautiful days we had this week, we explored a couple different kinds of dirt outside using magnifying glasses. We identified similarities and differences in the dirt and over the matter of 10 minutes or so we even began to notice that the moist soil was drying out on the top. I was informed by the kids that “the sun is taking the soil’s water just like it takes our water when we are outside; that’s why we have to drink so much water Ms. Audra. We should water the soil!”

We painted our own version of a garden; painting flowers, grass, trees, squirrels, our family members, rainbows and a cow. Very creative thinking on these ones and great for practicing colour mixing!

On Monday, we adventured to a new park where we practiced new skills; climbing nets and different types of ladders, walking along moving bases, and climbing rock walls. It was great that there was a number wall there to practice identifying numbers! The kids were also amazed to see an ant hill where the ants were guarding the entrance to their home…we could tell they thought of us as enemies. At the park we used the teeter totter to investigate weight. Why does the teeter totter lean to one side when there are bigger people on that side? What about when there are more of less people on one side? How can we make the teeter totter level? It was a lot of fun investigating this!

This week we re-visited the letter sounds for A and B and brainstormed of the words that start with those letters. Everyone is getting really good at coming up with these words! By the end of the week we had almost 50 B words! After brainstorming our initial words that start with a particular letter we have been practicing our copying and letter formation by writing some choice words. The day after we begin brainstorming, words everyone chose their favourite ie: letter A word and wrote that word and created something to represent that word.

With our circle time calendar routine, we have started to not only spell out the days of the week and month of the year, but also sound them out; identifying when vowels are using which of their two sounds.

On Thursday we explored Nosehill. We explored “Porcupine Valley” where we hiked up higher than we ever had before, spotted many beetles which we had to stop and water every time, saw new growing plants, and stumbled across porcupine quills. We even found some words that started with the letter B while we were there (bug, beetle, bud, butterfly).

Some other things we have done this week include; threading beads onto a pipe cleaner and then twisted it in different ways to form a flower, and creating a seed craft where we cut out our hand print, glued a seed onto that hand and wrote the word seed.

See everyone soon!
Xoxo Miss Audra