July 28th, 2017

What a hot week it has been! We have been able to spend so much time outdoors. We had a mini pool party, adventured to a couple new parks (I think we have visited almost every park in the community now), washed Bella in the backyard and even had the opportunity to go inside a fire truck to learn about the tools firefighters use and how they stay safe! We also had some fun baking muffins.

We continued with a couple more shapes this week as well; the semi-circle and the crescent. We folded circles into semi-circles to make spruce/pine trees and made size/colour patterns using paper crescents.

I hope everyone is having a wonderful summer so far!

July 21st, 2017

We sure love our shapes! Now that most of us know our basic shapes we have decided to try learning some trickier shapes like Pentagon, Octagon and Decagon. It is fun to learn shapes that have many sides when they have funny names! This week our main focus was on the oval, diamond, rectangle, triangle and pentagon. 

We took inspiration from Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar storybook to create a caterpillar that uses multiple oval shapes for its body. Some of the caterpillars were so full from eating all the food that their faces were grumpy looking and their feet couldn’t even touch the ground because of their full tummies. Too funny!

For the diamond shape we made kites that held confetti, macaroni and feathers between two transparencies. It was mesmerizing to watch the pieces fall back and forth as you tilted the kite.

What could be more yummy than making pizza while learning about shapes?! Everyone became min-chefs when we made mini triangle shaped pizzas. Mmm. We also painted an ocean on tin foil and added little triangle fish swim around on it. We even had some stingrays made.

I am a R-O-B-O-T. We pieced together robots using different sized rectangles. We learned that rectangles can be tall and skinny, fat and short, standing up or laying down, and even diagonal. The kids also did a great job finding and collecting objects that  were in the shape of a rectangle during our scavenger hunt.

A pentagon is like a drawing of a house; it has a roof, two walls and a bottom. It was quite funny to watch the kids try to form a pentagon with their bodies! We also spent some time wrapping yarn through and around a pentagon shape. This was great for practice in hand eye coordination and of course patience.

Unfortunately the air quality has not been too good this past week due to the forest fires, so we have not had as much outside time as we would like, but we have been spending a lot of time building forts and caves uses our sticks and balls kit. There are so many different things to build! Also, beware the bears that live in these caves…they are very quiet, very sneaky and quite cute!

July 14th, 2017

We have a new permanent addition to the Blooming Butterflies family. Bella, a five year old chocolate labrador, has come to live with us. The kids have really taken well to her and her to them. We have taken this opportunity to talk about why dogs do what they do i.e.: bark when people come to the door  or growl. We also talked about the parts of a dog and what they are for, and how these parts function similar or differently than in humans. i.e.: dogs have a really good smell memory and can remember who you are based on that…humans do not do this.

This week was full of new and fun things. We had a special 4th birthday, Bella joined us, for some of us it was the first time going to the “green park”, we explored a favourite nature area in the rain and we rode on the bus together to the library. The day we rode the bus to the library was, and I quote “The BEST day EVER!” We met new people, got to give coins to the bus driver, sit sideways or backwards on the bus, play with toys at the library, read books, check out books, etc.

Among our adventures, we explored shapes through songs and activities. We covered the heart, start, circle and square. We even figured out how many sides each shape has, or doesn’t have. 

For the heart we talked about what we think of when we see a heart. Things like the body, Valentines Day and love came up. After dancing to an extremely energetic song, we took a marshmallow on a toothpick, placed it on our wrists and watched to see what would happen. Our hearts were beating so fast that the marshmallows fell right off our wrists. In addition to our experiment, we made artwork using chalk to trace around a heart stencils, and brushed the chalk to create a neat effect around the edges of the heart shape.

For the star we decorated a star shape with glitter glue ad beads. We also played with a baking soda and vinegar experiment (one of our most favourite science experiments). We had baking soda filled shapes and chose two colours of vinegar to spoon onto the baking soda. What fun!

For the square we measured big, medium and small paper squares using foam shapes. We also made artwork by taping horizontal and vertical lines on a paper and painting within the remaining spaces. When the tape came off we had some neat and colourful square shapes.

For the circle we painted using the circular bottom of the toilet paper tubes.