​We celebrated the end of our Pippi Longstocking chapter book by having a Crazy Hair Day! There were so many silly hair styles; green, worms, backwards ponytail, lots of ponytails and lots of braids! So fun! We had some awesome comments and compliments from neighbours while we were out and about. We also did some Blow painting crazy hair onto face drawings.
 
This week we started learning about the parts of a plant and what each parts job is. I am sure you have heard out plant song a few times by now! We have been talking about planting a garden, as I was gifted a couple of planters and soil. Everyone has all sorts of ideas about what we should plant and we are all working together in learning about gardening. We were quite interested to learn that are buddies, in that they are helpful to one another in growing, taste and keeping pests away. Hmm…knowing some of these things has made planning our garden quite an adventure in thinking and problem solving. We are excited to start our garden next week hopefully! 
 
The kids sounded out and wrote the parts of a flower and spelled FLOWER in teams of two. They are all doing so well with their letter sounds and identification, even the younger ones. As a group, they also sequenced the alphabet in picture form. And Word Work this week included everyone; dentifying and sounding out small words and running them across the house.
 
We sure enjoyed the array of weather we had this week; sunshine, snow, rain, hail. But although we had precipitation, we were disappointed that we could not find any big enough puddles to jump in. We still had fun exploring and playing outside though! The kids made up this bucket race game where the goal was to carry the bucket on the skipping rope without letting it touch the ground. Fun and tricky!
 
And of course, we cannot forget about the very Happy Birthday we got to celebrate this week. If you ever wanted to know what excited meant, just ask this little four-year-old!

Happy Mother’s Day to all the wonderful mother figures out there! I hope it was a wonderful weekend!
 
This past week we continued our outer space theme while working on some Mother’s Day goodies. We focused on the planets and dwarf planets this time. They practically know all the planet names now; I’m quite impressed! We compared their sizes and locations, talked about some of their characteristics. We were also quite interested in how many moons each planet had; it ranged from zero to the high double digits! The kids used numbered planets to sequence and count by twos with. It was also quite fun to listen to astronauts read while at the international space station, which then led to some wonderful discussions about what astronauts do up there and how they do daily things in zero gravity. 
 
The kids practiced being little scientists, using our new droppers with baking soda and vinegar. Some worked really hard on their pouring skills too.
 
Our letters this week were X, Y and Z, therefore completing our second round of the alphabet letters. The kids built these letters using lego and their bodies and wrote them on the board. We look forward to reviewing the alphabet through song, dance and games for the rest of the school year.
 
The big kids worked on their OP words again this week. This time they looked drawings of OP words and glued the appropriate letters to spell them.
 
We have been so excited to see more of Spring for a few days until it snowed again. So many crocuses! Our NoseHill adventures are proving to be much more interesting in terms of scenery and growth. We have been exploring new Nose Hill Park pathways....getting ourselves ready for our hike across NoseHill in the coming weeks.

Week 1
The kids have been interested in doing a space theme for weeks now, so here we are!
 
We talked about all the things we already knew about space; the planets, the moon, the sun and stars. We learned so many neat facts that we didn’t know, like the moon makes the Earth spin smoothly instead of wobbly, the moon’s gravity makes the tides roll in and out, the sun is the biggest and closest star in our solar system, and that moon is Earth’s only natural satellite. Many found it very interesting just how many things spin; the moon spins itself and around the Earth and the Earth spins itself and around the sun.
 
The first week of our space theme is focused around the moon and the stars. Did you know cows can’t jump over the moon?! Well you do now! We learned that the moon is always there in the night-time, even if we cannot see it fully. It’s just in different amounts of shadow sometimes! We played with the idea of moon phases and made moon suncatchers that had stars glued inside the crescent shape. The kids did a little exploring of size, weight, distance and gravity by dropping meteoroids (marbles) onto the moon (flour and cinnamon) to create craters.
 
Twinkle Twinkle Little Star was a very popular nursery rhyme this week, along with Hey Diddle Diddle (as noted above!). Where do the stars go during the day? Well they stay right up there in space! The kids went on a hunt for numbered stars with their telescopes, and also clipped the corresponding amount of stars on their number match wheel. They also practiced a new technique with watercolour paints, by drawing stars, and star related things, in white crayon and then using enough water in their paints to get a translucent wash of colour. It’s quite tricky to use watercolours when you are so used to using tempera.
 
We did some cooperative storytelling this week, that involved a lot of patience, taking turns, knowing the stages of a story and following the parts of the story that had already been laid out from the kids prior to themselves.
 
We also made some space star playdough using yellow colour and gold glitter and played a visual discrimination game.
 
Our letters this week were V and W. The kids built, matched and wrote these letters. They also put stars on letters, words and pictures that start with W, and wrote in their leftover “moon” material (flour and cinnamon).
 
The big kids continued their work on the “op” word family. This time they worked in partners; one wrote an “op” word and the other had to write it in “moon salt”.
 
On an unrelated note…We were so excited to have finally found crocuses!